Rudolph Hall

Paul Rudolph designed the Art and Architecture Building to house Yale’s painters, sculptors, and architects in 1963, after he’d ridden the wave of midcentury modernism to the top of the university’s architecture department. Anchoring the corner of Chapel and York Streets, the building is modern insofar as it is ahistorical, and utterly uninterested in making you comfortable—the pillars’ edges are jagged. Some thought the A&A daring, others brutal. It secured Rudolph’s legacy, but crashed his career: two years after its completion, he abdicated his chairmanship, leaving behind a mess of graffiti and “favelas” constructed by students hiding from the concrete. A 1969 fire burned away the graffiti and paprika-orange carpets and cleansed the A&A down to its guts. Yet the prohibitive cost of demolishing the byzantine behemoth kept it standing in ugly, tortured reanimation until 2008, when Robert A. M. Stern, then dean of the School of Architecture, threw all the paprika and plaster back in as part of a comprehensive restoration. Renaming the building Rudolph Hall, he commissioned an exhibition celebrating the architect’s career, where people said things like, “He was unbelievably energetic and full of passion—and he scared the hell out of us as well.”

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Both the Yale School of Architecture and Department of the History of Art occupy the building complex at the corner of York and Chapel, composed of Rudolph Hall and the Jeffrey H. Loria Center. Known as the Art and Architecture Building when it was built in 1963, Rudolph Hall is all hammered concrete and rough edges. Its brutalist style contrasts beautifully with Louis Kahn’s Yale University Art Gallery and British Art Museum, which round out the intersection. The Loria Center, designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates, adds a postmodern feel to the area.