The Surface As Stake: a Postscript to Timothy M. Rohan's

Architecture ﬂoor of the Yale Art and Architecture Building, spring, 1967. Photo: Roy Berkeley.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127831 by guest on 27 September 2021 The Surface as Stake: A Postscript to Timothy M. Rohan’s “Rendering the Surface”

TOM MCDONOUGH

“A stately marble statue of the goddess Minerva presides over the charred rubble on the two floors of Yale’s School of Art and Architecture that were swept by a fire just before dawn on June 14,” reported The New York Times early in the summer of 1969.1 That statue, which had surveyed the drafting room, was in fact the only object of any consequence to survive the powerful fire that destroyed the fourth and fifth levels of Paul Rudolph’s building, levels which housed the architecture and city planning programs. Around four o’clock on that Saturday morning, witnesses reported hearing an explosion followed by a series of others, and although the fire was brought under control in less than an hour, the two floors were completely gutted and other levels badly damaged by heat, smoke, and water. Temperatures were so extreme that some steel beams warped. New Haven fire chief Francis Sweeney was quoted immediately in the press, saying that “I will consider it to be of suspicious origin until we prove differently.”2 The June 14 fire in fact represented only the culmination of over five years of controversy in which Rudolph’s building had played a central role. Timothy M. Rohan’s fine article, “Rendering the Surface: Paul Rudolf’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale,” (Grey Room 01 [Fall 2000]: 84–107) provided us with a psychosocial account of the genesis of the building’s design in the architect’s fraught anxieties around the gendered terms of ornament and design in postwar America. Here I would like merely to add a postscript, a note on how the building and its signature surface became the stake of contemporary political contestation after its celebrated debut. Architecture’s meaning remains fundamentally a social matter, produced not simply in the individual architect’s psyche, nor even in an internal dialogue with architectural tradition, but rather in the articulation of conflicting patterns of use and appropriation, some autho- rized and others resolutely illegitimate. From its very inception, the A & A had been the center of con- tention. “The Yale Daily News reported that painters and sculp- tors threatened to picket the opening ceremonies,” commented Progressive Architecture editor Jan C. Rowan in his introduc- tion to the magazine’s coverage of the new building. But the indignation was hardly limited to those students relegated to basement and garret; “on my last visit,” Rowan continued, “I

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127831 by guest on 27 September 2021 noticed that the building had been splattered with eggs and one window pierced by a bullet from a zip gun.”3 This remarkable violence, this insistent violation of the surface of the school, was already visible early in 1964, at a time when campus unrest was still rather unusual. (The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, for example, would appear only later that year, in the fall of 1964.) Hardly random vandalism, these attacks were an implicit resistance to what Rohan perceptively calls the building’s “hypermasculinity.” Indeed the building, designed for Yale’s all-male campus (women were not admitted until the fall of 1968), was consis- tently described in contemporary press as fortress-like, and the roughness of the corrugated concrete surface was specifically seen in terms of masculine textures. At the 1963 dedication Nikolaus Pevsner compared it to tweed, and the reviewer for Progressive Architecture described it as “ribbed and fuzzy looking, like a collegiate shetland sweater.”4 Such terms are

revealing: although meant to be neutrally descriptive, they con- vey an image of the A & A as an unmistakably virile building, one as conservative and old-fashioned as Rudolph’s own vin- tage 1950s crewcut. Planned during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, the A & A would come of age in a rather dif- ferent world, one where students chose denim rather than tweed and where Rudolph’s hypermasculine surfaces would be seen almost inevitably as authoritarian.5 The student dissatisfaction was so blatant, so unavoidable, that the architectural press had felt compelled to address the issue. As early as 1967 a critic for Architectural Forum returned to New Haven and found that “exposed concrete walls that, four years ago, were fresh from the vertical formboards are now plas- tered with graffiti.”6 The signature fractured surfaces of the A & A Graffiti on walls of Yale Art and were subject to particular hostility: Architecture Building, spring, The relatively smooth surfaces left by the vertical forming 1967. Photo: seem the most popular, although there are also shy graffiti Roy Berkeley.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127831 by guest on 27 September 2021 occasionally penned in the vertical ribbing of the concrete corduroy. Most popular places are the usual ones—bath- rooms, stair towers, elevator lobbies—plus a few unusual ones (a derogatory comment about the building appears, for instance, under one armpit of the Leonardo ﬁgure).

Students stuffed cigarette butts into the holes left behind by the anchors of the formwork. Even Rudolph’s resurrected casts were subject to abuse, the Minerva statue having had her eyes “‘blunked out’ [sic] like Little Orphan Annie.”7 The drafting room over which the goddess watched had been subject to the greatest transformation since Rudolph’s depar- ture from the school in 1966. His carefully designed drafting tables, laid out in neat rows, were replaced by what the Archi- tectural Forum critic could only call “a favella, a spontaneous shantytown that changes with the years”8 as incoming students built individual studios out of whatever materials were to hand, some even designing two-story structures in the double-height space. The exhibition space on the second floor, which also had never been popular with the students, was altered as well. The new head of the architecture program, Charles W. Moore, working with faculty members F.R.R. Drury and Kent Bloomer, con- structed from reflective mylar a room within a room, dizzyingly illuminated by film clips and an all-white light show coordi- nated by Pulsa, a New Haven-based lighting design group. Entitled “Project Argus,” the space was meant to provide an “open-ended experimental atmosphere,” presumably in contrast to Rudolph’s staid architectural surround.9 But such reformist gestures, the attempt to foster a liberally permissive environ- ment, would prove inadequate to the demands being made on the institution. For Rudolph’s building, fostering as it did an out-of-date image of architects and planners retreating behind their tweedy stronghold, would become the stake in a much larger struggle around issues of student participation, community responsi- bility, and racial equality. Yale had certainly not remained aloof from the unrest of the later 1960s: 1968 saw the matriculation of the first coed class, and the campus was engaged simultane- ously in broad debates over achieving racial parity in admissions, with many calling for an increased presence of African Americans and Latinos in the student body. Within the School of Art and Architecture the city planning department, chaired by Christopher Tunnard, most strongly advanced this position. During the 1968–1969 academic year Tunnard supported the creation of the “City Planning Forum,” a student-faculty group that served as a governing body within the department; as an experiment in participatory democracy, it went unrecognized by the university. When in the spring of 1969 the A & A accepted eighteen appli- cants to the planning program and, of the eight who enrolled, only one was an African American, the Forum took it upon itself early in May to approve an additional twelve candidates,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127831 by guest on 27 September 2021 nine of whom were black, and forwarded their files to the dean of the school. When the dean refused to act, the Forum mailed their own acceptance letters on official Yale stationery. A spokesperson for the group reported that this unilateral action was taken only after “we reached a frustration level” with the inaction of the A & A’s administration. As the New York Times would report, “their decision, they said, reflected their sense of the urgent need for black professionals to work in slum neigh- borhoods.”10 While not without its own patronizing assumptions, the concerns of the students and faculty of the city planning department reflected broadly held beliefs of that moment about the importance of advocacy planning and the significance of community-based initiatives—all part of a larger critique of the presumptions of modernist planning doctrine. The Yale administration acted swiftly. The university’s pres- ident, Kingman Brewster Jr., relieved Tunnard of his adminis- trative duties; Louis S. DeLuca, assistant dean of the A & A, was also dismissed from his post; and a faculty member, Harry Wexler, was informed that his appointment would likely not be renewed. Brewster in fact began overseeing a dismantling of the city planning program, writing to the eight enrolled students for the following academic year that, due to “some very recent, unexpected and unfortunate occurrences here. . . . we would strongly advise you not to enroll at Yale next year for the degree in city planning.” Although he promised to “honor our commitment of admission,” he added that “we cannot now promise to offer a degree administered by an adequate department of city planning.” The twelve recipients of the “unauthorized” letters were informed summarily that the letters did not repre- sent official notification of acceptance.11 Students and many faculty were outraged by the administration’s actions. The former went on strike, demanding a formalized role in admissions and curriculum planning; the latter circulated a petition challenging the university’s steps against the city planning department. One member of the Black Architects’ Workshop, a small student group with a storefront office near the A & A dedicated to working with the local African American community, was quoted as saying, “Yale is an institution dedicated to perpetuating the status quo” of racial inequality. While university officials attempted to deny that race was an issue in the dispute (the provost said the controversy was instead over “a challenge to the university’s integrity”), the Workshop sent a memorandum to the administration which, appropriating the language of the school’s promotional material, began: “Yale University is older than the nation itself. Hence, its myths, lies, deceit and trickery are older than the nation itself.”12 The controversy reached a head in an anonymous broad- sheet distributed to guests arriving for graduation ceremonies Yale Art and Archi- that June. Boldly titled “WHY HAS YALE NOT GONE UP IN tecture Building, SMOKE?” it urged “Yale . . . don’t kill the arts! The recent following June 14, 1969 fire. Photo: destruction of the city planning department by the Yale admin- Art Dietle, New istration shows that Yale intends to continue serving the rich. Haven Register.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127831 by guest on 27 September 2021 This action should be immediately reversed.” But it was the handbill’s concluding advice to parents and alumni that would prove prophetic: “During your stay at Yale SEE THE A & A BUILDING, SEE EVERY BUILDING, SEE THEM SOON.”13 One week later an intense ﬁre, which failed to set off the building’s alarm system, raced through Paul Rudolph’s A & A. Architectural Record reported that in the days previous, students had been circulating a leaﬂet “stating that the building has no point and should be burned.”14 Once again, the structure itself was at the center of controversy.

Arson was immediately suspected in the ﬁre, which did over $900,000 worth of damage and forced the relocation of the school for the 1969–1970 academic year. The New York Times ran a prominent article entitled “After Fire, Yale Smolders,” and Architectural Record featured photographs of the burnt-out building under the headline “Arson suspected in ﬁre at Yale Art and Architecture Building.” From its very dedication, Rudolph’s building had been the site of contested meaning, the stake in a series of related struggles over two differing understandings of the university and its place in the city. In those struggles, the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127831 by guest on 27 September 2021 corrugated concrete surface had come to signify all that was reactionary in the architectural conception and institutional organization of the school. After the fire that surface, stained black by smoke and soot, stood as a literal ruin at the corner of York and Chapel Streets. The New Haven fire department con- ducted an investigation into the blaze, which was to last four weeks and then stretched into six. At its conclusion, fire mar- shal Thomas Lyden reported that any link between the broadside and the fire remained “unsubstantiated.” He would tell reporters that no evidence of arson was uncovered and that the cause of the fire had been ruled “undetermined.”15 Thirty-odd years later, it is less the “truth” of the fire which interests us— arson or accident, political act or coincidence—than its crucial role as a locus of competing discourses: an event and a building that became the site of conflicting definitions of a community. The meaning of architecture lies not in its origins, but in such struggles, not in the dialogue a discipline conducts with itself, but in the sometimes violent irruptions of other voices into those exchanges.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127831 by guest on 27 September 2021 Exterior of the Yale Art and Architecture Building, following June 14, 1969 ﬁre. Photo: Gene Gorlick, New Haven Register.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127831 by guest on 27 September 2021 Notes I would like to thank Aruna D’Souza for her critical comments on drafts of this essay, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture for its support of research used here.

1. Joseph Lelyveld, “After Fire, Yale Smolders,” New York Times, 27 June 1969, 39. 2. See the following accounts of the fire for details: “Forum,” Architectural Forum 131 (July 1969): 41–42; and “Arson suspected in fire at Yale Art and Architecture Building,” Architectural Record 146 (July 1969): 36. 3. Jan C. Rowan, “Editorial,” Progressive Architecture 45 (February 1964): 107. A telling contrast between faculty and student perceptions of these design flaws was already provided by the divide separating these acts of vandalism from Vincent Scully’s cavalier account of campus dissatisfaction in his review of the building, “Art and Architecture Building, Yale University,” Architectural Review 135 (May 1964): 133. 4. “A & A: Yale School of Art and Architecture; Paul Rudolph, architect,” Progressive Architecture 45 (February 1964): 332. 5. The significance of the masculinist connotations of fabric in cultural production has been analyzed by art historian Anna C. Chave in relation to Frank Stella’s black paintings. Developing a common comparison, she described their likeness “to those bolts of fine pinstriped wool flannel used for decades by Brooks Brothers and J. Press to make the suits of bankers, executives, and politicians. The full connotations of the quintessential Power Fabric could scarcely have been lost on Stella, a 1958 graduate of Princeton University and an alumnus of Andover prep school.” See her problematic but provocative “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” in Power: Its Myths and Mores in American Art, 1961–1991, ed. Holliday T. Day (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1991), 121–22. 6. Ellen Perry Berkeley, “Yale: A Building as a Teacher,” Architectural Forum 127 (July/August 1967): 50. 7. Berkeley, “Yale,” 50. 8. Berkeley, “Yale,” 48. 9. For a brief account of Project Argus, see C. Ray Smith, Supermannerism (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977), 108–09. 10. See the accounts provided in John Darnton, “2 Ousted at Yale Over Admissions,” New York Times, 28 May 1969, 32; and Lelyveld, “After Fire, Yale Smolders,” 39. 11. See Darnton, “2 Ousted at Yale,” 32. Brewster also wrote a letter of cen- sure to the six students active in the City Planning Forum, threatening them with the loss of their degrees, although this was later recanted. The twelve unauthorized students were later offered admission as “special students” out- side the degree program; seven accepted this status, and their enrollment was promptly used by Yale as evidence of the university’s commitment to encour- aging African American matriculation. 12. Quoted in Lelyveld, “After Fire, Yale Smolders,” 74. 13. The text of the broadside is reprinted in “Forum,” Architectural Forum 131 (July 1969): 42. The five students who composed the text were not members of the School of Art and Architecture and, as the Times reported, “all are known to the authorities” (Lelyveld, “After Fire, Yale Smolders,” 39). One of the authors explained to a reporter that “they had meant to call attention to the deterioration of communications among students, faculty members and administrators on a campus that so far has escaped violent unrest. The fire, said the student . . ., was ‘an extremely unfortunate coincidence.’” See Lelyveld, “After Fire, Yale Smolders,” 39. 14. “Arson suspected,” 36. This leaflet, not mentioned in other press accounts, could be merely an inaccurate description of the earlier broadside. 15. As reported in “No Arson Is Found at Yale in Inquiry on Art School Fire,”

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127831 by guest on 27 September 2021 New York Times, 29 July 1969, 39. For the aftermath of this controversy, includ- ing the reorganization of the School of Art and Architecture, see “Yale Will Divide Disputed School,” New York Times, 21 September 1969, 56; and “Yale A and A: Restructured and Still Going Strong,” Architectural Record 147 (March 1970): 37. Despite the hopeful tone of the latter, it was telling that restoration work on the A & A was placed not in Rudolph’s hands but in those of William de Cossy (of Douglas Orr, de Cossy, Winder, and Associates), described as “a long-time associate” of Rudolph. His repair was at best insensitive to the inten- tions of the architect.

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