AIArchitect

so informative, thanks to tell us.

As a student in the Architecture School at SUNY at Buffalo in the 70's I recall how many of us who were students of Architectural Historian Reyner Banham learned to love the Centre Pompidou by Piano and Rogers. A lot of this had to do with, I'm sure, the infectious manner Banham spoke about the museum as an example of a megastructure- well described in his book on Megastructures. I don't think Banham ranked Paul Rudolph with Mies, LeCorbusier, Wright, Adolph Loos!,Josef Hoffmann, or Peter Behrens and he may well have pilloried him in his lectures if he thought the building did not live up to the architect's description as he did many other architects -but I don't remember him doing that with Rudolph. I do remember the chairman of the Architecture school, George Anselevicious the architect, expressing a great sadness that anyone would attempt to destroy a work by an architect (in reference to Rudolph's Yale Art & Architecture Building). For some reason this sentiment stuck with me. I'm happy to learn that the fire was an accident and not intentional.
I'm also glad that the profession is spending more effort on measuring how buildings perform and how they serve the user. How many of us asked how comfortable it would be in Corb's Unite d'Habitation with single pane glass (especially for a nude model in some artist's studio)? Banham did!

Stepanie,

Having been at Yale as both an undergraduate and an architecture student circa 1963-71, I experienced the brand-new A&A , lived with its decline (accidental and creatively enhanced) under Charles Moore, lost stuff in the fire, and followed Yale's fitful efforts thereafter. At one point I helped Ed Barnes, then University planner, study a proposal to have the Yale Art Gallery and the A&A School switch buildings. The A&A students had loved their old top floor in Kahn's building, and Rudolph's Piranesian spaces could be restored as galleries, following their disastrous debut as studios. The Art Gallery balked, and no one mentioned this again.

I suspect the fire really was accidental, a predictable result of the enormous chipboard favelas that had arisen under the flaking asbestos ceilings. Perverse wonder was more prevalent than hatred among the original A&A students. Mr. Gwathmey and Dean Stern have my best wishes in their attempt to bring some of it back.

My favorite comment about the Yale A&A Building is from Joe Esherick (who taught in a California style version of a monumental Brutalist architecture school, Wurster Hall on the Berkeley campus). Of the Yale A&A, Esherick once told me: "You can't go to the men's room without having a spatial experience."

I spent four years of my life in the A&A at Yale, and only left it with my Masters in 2005.

It became, and remains, the building that most inspired me...although this sentiment would probably surprise my classmates. At one time, early in my stay--for instance--I shocked a few of them by suggesting that the long-ago arsonist\architecture-students should haven't merely set it on fire. Hadn't they heard of explosives? My only excuse for such a remark is that I expressed it shortly after a particularly difficult crit, made all the more exquisitely painful by the oppressive humidity and heat in "the pit"--which curled the plots so carefully pinned, warped our pathetic little chipboard models, addled our sleep-deprived brains just when they needed addling the least, and left us collapsed in sweaty heaps in the corners as we awaited--or recovered from--our ordeals. I would stare up at the skylights so far above the stained carpet...the four giant columns seemed to mock me; I couldn't even lean against any jagged, textured wall without inflicting pain on myself.

But eventually I came to appreciate that it wasn't just the typical prison perceived by architecture students...it was the manifestation of the Piranesian prototype in modernist form, or even a brutalist version of Mervyn Peake's infinite and infinitely-ruinous Gormenghast Castle. Was it only three dozen or so levels on only eight floors? There always seemed to be more...a disused tower room, floor dotted with cigarette butts and ruined models that could have been there a dozen years; a passage through the gallery space in the basement that led to a parallel set of offices and corridors used by busy, completely unfamiliar staff members; a painted-over door off of a studio that left one in a balcony overlooking the auditorium; a strange tiny courtyard, reached by stair and left by stair, where someone had burnt something large recently, with the black ashes left to whirl around the bush-hammered concrete.

I have experienced many buildings, but none that quite managed to mix both the terrible and the sublime in this manner. There was some important--ineffable, perhaps, but important--lesson to be learned in simply being there and using the architecture. This is a lesson I worry that students in the restored and sanitized version will not have.

Stephanie

As the former Dean of the School of Architecture at SUNY Buffalo, I am impressed that as a once upon a time student you remember such discussions.
Personally I remember with fondness the Darwin Martin House by Wright (probably my favorite architect among the modernists.