TOM BURR BODY/BUILDING BODY/BUILDING A selection of material to accompany the exhibition Tom Burr / New Haven, an Artist / City project BY ADRIAN GAUT TEXT BY MARK OWENS PHOTOGRAPHY BY ADRIAN GAUT TEXT BY MARK OWENS PHOTOGRAPH YALE ART AND ARCHITECTURE BUILDING, PAUL RUDOLPH (1963). 180 YORK STREET, BRUTAL RECALL NEW HAVEN. A SELECTIVE ROADMAP OF SOME OF NEW HAVEN’S MOST ICONIC CONCRETE LANDMARKS Entering New Haven by car along Interstate 95 offers a tour through one of America’s last remaining Brutalist corridors. Approaching the Oak Street Connector, you can still catch a glimpse of the briskly fenestrated raw-concrete façade of Marcel Breuer’s striking Armstrong Rubber Company Building (1968), which now sits vacant in a vast IKEA parking lot. Heading towards George Street along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, a stoplight just outside the town’s commercial center brings you momen- tarily to rest at the foot of Roche-Dinkeloo’s enigmatic Knights of Columbus Building (1969), whose 23 raw-steel stories are slung between four colossal brick-clad concrete columns. Further along the boulevard on the right rises the distinctive silhouette of Paul Rudolph’s Crawford Manor housing block (1966), whose “heroic and origi- automobile. It’s perhaps ironically fitting, then, that in order to complete this Brutalist nal” striated-cement cladding promenade you’re best off proceeding on foot. Continuing down Temple Street and was famously contrasted with making a left turn onto Chapel Street, you eventually come to the entrance of Louis the “ugly and ordinary” visage Kahn’s Yale University Art Gallery (1951–53), an expressive use of brick, concrete, and of Venturi and Rauch’s Guild curtain wall that was completed a year before the Alison and Peter Smithson’s Hun- House in the pages of Learning stanton School (Norfolk, England, 1949–54), generally considered the opening salvo from Las Vegas. Making a of New Brutalism in Britain. Fully renovated in 2012, Kahn’s gallery can now be expe- U-turn back down Martin Luther rienced largely as it was intended, a tour de force of open space, restraint, and material King Jr. Boulevard, we find mastery. It was Kahn’s first significant building; two decades later, across the street, another Paul Rudolph monu- he built his last, the Yale Center for British Art (1974), which was completed just after ment, the massive 1,235-capac- his death. A masterpiece of spatial sophistication, its second-floor Library Court is ity Temple Street Parking dominated by a massive raw-concrete staircase cylinder — a final Brutalist gesture. Garage (1963), a concrete hulk Opposite the Yale University Art Gallery stands what is perhaps New Haven’s most whose otherworldly sculptural famous Brutalist landmark, Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building (aka Paul Rudolph arches span two city blocks. Hall, 1963). Designed and completed during his tenure as head of Yale’s architecture Alternately maligned as a program, the building was incredibly personal for Rudolph and aimed both to stimulate gloomy eyesore or lamented as the pedagogic integration of the arts it housed and to address the perceived failures a missed opportunity, the of what had become understood as an orthodox Miesian functionalism. A study in garage formed the centerpiece monumentality, urban context, and the expressive potential of decoration and detail, of an ambitious urban-redevel- the building’s intersecting volumes are clad, inside and out, in the heavily textured opment scheme that was meant concrete “corduroy” panels that would become a signature of Rudolph’s work and of to reshape the 1960s city in Brutalism in general. Created through a painstaking process — the concrete was cast accordance with the rise of the in ridged formwork and afterwards bush-hammered by hand to reveal the underlying aggregate — the panels’ texturing attempts to capture the highly graphic effect of Rudolph’s presentation drawings in three dimensions. The result is what might be described as a kind of Brutalist camp, in which low relief is elevated to a structural principle. As examples of the utopian urge of late Modernism and the exertions of political and civic power to shape what Kevin Lynch has called the city’s “imageabil- ity,” these buildings are graphic gestures that remind us of a period when architects, planners, and highly-skilled tradesmen attempted to make New Haven literally anew. 194 PORTFOLIO BY ADRIAN GAUT TEXT BY MARK OWENS PHOTOGRAPHY BY ADRIAN GAUT TEXT BY MARK OWENS PHOTOGRAPH YALE ART AND ARCHITECTURE BUILDING, PAUL RUDOLPH (1963). 180 YORK STREET, BRUTAL RECALL NEW HAVEN. A SELECTIVE ROADMAP OF SOME OF NEW HAVEN’S MOST ICONIC CONCRETE LANDMARKS Entering New Haven by car along Interstate 95 offers a tour through one of America’s last remaining Brutalist corridors. Approaching the Oak Street Connector, you can still catch a glimpse of the briskly fenestrated raw-concrete façade of Marcel Breuer’s striking Armstrong Rubber Company Building (1968), which now sits vacant in a vast IKEA parking lot. Heading towards George Street along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, a stoplight just outside the town’s commercial center brings you momen- tarily to rest at the foot of Roche-Dinkeloo’s enigmatic Knights of Columbus Building (1969), whose 23 raw-steel stories are slung between four colossal brick-clad concrete columns. Further along the boulevard on the right rises the distinctive silhouette of Paul Rudolph’s Crawford Manor housing block (1966), whose “heroic and origi- automobile. It’s perhaps ironically fitting, then, that in order to complete this Brutalist nal” striated-cement cladding promenade you’re best off proceeding on foot. Continuing down Temple Street and was famously contrasted with making a left turn onto Chapel Street, you eventually come to the entrance of Louis the “ugly and ordinary” visage Kahn’s Yale University Art Gallery (1951–53), an expressive use of brick, concrete, and of Venturi and Rauch’s Guild curtain wall that was completed a year before the Alison and Peter Smithson’s Hun- House in the pages of Learning stanton School (Norfolk, England, 1949–54), generally considered the opening salvo from Las Vegas. Making a of New Brutalism in Britain. Fully renovated in 2012, Kahn’s gallery can now be expe- U-turn back down Martin Luther rienced largely as it was intended, a tour de force of open space, restraint, and material King Jr. Boulevard, we find mastery. It was Kahn’s first significant building; two decades later, across the street, another Paul Rudolph monu- he built his last, the Yale Center for British Art (1974), which was completed just after ment, the massive 1,235-capac- his death. A masterpiece of spatial sophistication, its second-floor Library Court is ity Temple Street Parking dominated by a massive raw-concrete staircase cylinder — a final Brutalist gesture. Garage (1963), a concrete hulk Opposite the Yale University Art Gallery stands what is perhaps New Haven’s most whose otherworldly sculptural famous Brutalist landmark, Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building (aka Paul Rudolph arches span two city blocks. Hall, 1963). Designed and completed during his tenure as head of Yale’s architecture Alternately maligned as a program, the building was incredibly personal for Rudolph and aimed both to stimulate gloomy eyesore or lamented as the pedagogic integration of the arts it housed and to address the perceived failures a missed opportunity, the of what had become understood as an orthodox Miesian functionalism. A study in garage formed the centerpiece monumentality, urban context, and the expressive potential of decoration and detail, of an ambitious urban-redevel- the building’s intersecting volumes are clad, inside and out, in the heavily textured opment scheme that was meant concrete “corduroy” panels that would become a signature of Rudolph’s work and of to reshape the 1960s city in Brutalism in general. Created through a painstaking process — the concrete was cast accordance with the rise of the in ridged formwork and afterwards bush-hammered by hand to reveal the underlying aggregate — the panels’ texturing attempts to capture the highly graphic effect of Rudolph’s presentation drawings in three dimensions. The result is what might be described as a kind of Brutalist camp, in which low relief is elevated to a structural principle. As examples of the utopian urge of late Modernism and the exertions of political and civic power to shape what Kevin Lynch has called the city’s “imageabil- ity,” these buildings are graphic gestures that remind us of a period when architects, planners, and highly-skilled tradesmen attempted to make New Haven literally anew. 194 PORTFOLIO This content downloaded from 132.206.27.24 on Mon, 15 Sep 2014 21:35:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 132.206.27.