Summary: This week, our readers only have eyes (and words) for Gwathmey Siegel’s restoration of and addition to Paul Rudolph’s iconic Arts and Architecture Building at Yale University.

Re: Gwathmey Helps Yale Architecture School Icon Re-emerge

It kind of looks like a pink stucco flat-roofed addition to a green-shingle style Queen Ann Victorian mansion. Was there some reason not to try to tie the old to the new using the thread of similar materials? I appreciate not trying to make the addition look like what Rudolph might have done, as nobody will get it right even if they actually could get it right. But, really, this addition is more a Gwathmey Siegel stand-alone that happens to be right next to Rudolph's Art and Architecture, cheek by jowl.

I suppose it could be worse: they could have tried to clad the original building in Alucabond panels or maybe even EIFS. But, Yale is a cacophony of "Look at Me" architecture on every corner. A&A probably wouldn't have worked anywhere else other than in Yale's Disneysque "Land of the Proud Architects" campus. A&A is a fact that should be preserved to illustrate Rudolph's "thinking" when he did it. Maybe an addition isn't the right approach: maybe there needs to be some space left between it and its new neighbor. Maybe, in this environment, the approach should be more in keeping with the concept proffered by David Dillon of providing "Background Buildings," especially in an environment of such prominent "Hey, look at me" buildings that Yale's campus is littered with.

—David Baillif
Dallas

P.S. You know, if it were done by anybody else other than Gwathmey Siegel, this would be easy to explain and dismiss.

I realize it's hard to judge from a single elevation image, but it appears that Charles Gwathmey has done his best to make the addition to the A&A Building an inflated version of one of his early Long Island houses.

The bay above the entrance, the gigantic, partly occluded door-shape at the center, and the cluster of windows at the upper right all seem intent on rendering a seven-story building as if it were a three-story one; yet, in contrast to the windows of the A&A that the cluster "references," these devices bring the scale up, rather than down.

And the History of Art center decidedly does not "match the Art and Architecture building in pure exterior volumetric complexity." The strokes are too few and too broad. Rudolph, for all the egoism of his building, learned from the patterns—both of volume and surface—of Yale's Collegiate Gothic fabric. Gwathmey, I fear, has not.

I hope I'm wrong.

—Tim Culvahouse, FAIA, Yale MED '86
Editor, arcCA (Architecture California)
Berkeley, Calif.

Charles Gwathmey, FAIA, and his firm Gwathmey Siegel & Associates are proposing a design that is 180 degrees from Paul Rudolph’s iconic Yale Art and Architecture Building. And that is not good!

It is sad to see good, timeless architecture suffer from another architect's bold, different, (self-centered ego trip?) already dated architectural design addition to this building.

Does Yale need the "help?"

—David R. (Skip) Brown III AIA
WPH Architecture Inc.
Portland, Ore.