Who Is Paul Rudolph's A & A?

One of the most waited for events, in an architectural sense, was the completion of Paul Rudolph’s Yale Art and Architecture building in 1963 a postwar American Architectural event. Also known as the A&A it was considered Rudolph’s master piece as it promised to be the solution to solving modernism’s major unsolved problems. As New York Times critic Ada Louise Huxtable said, “it asks and answers some of the major questions facing the art of architecture today, at a time of crisis and transition in the development of the contemporary style.” As one of the earliest Brutalist architectural buildings in North America Rudolph’s A&A was acclaimed as a breakthrough to modernism through its famously large-scaled bush hammered corrugated concrete surfaces. …show more content…
“in his book townscape Cullen illustrated how buildings of different eras accrued along the irregular streets of an English town, resulting in a pleasing whole.” Rudolph’s understanding of Gordon Cullen’s Townscape helped him develop ideas about how urban spaces affect humanism. Instead of advocating functionalism planning, where everything is cleared from site to build in a new consistent way Rudolph used the existing Ruskinian Gothic and Romanesque surroundings that culminated into the new A&A building. Rudolph created a what he called a “reciprocal relationship” with khan’s Yale art gallery adjacent to the A&A by having open transparent banks of windows at the center to compliments Khan’s transparent non masonry wall. Rudolph said “that the two buildings together marked the edge of the campus like a …show more content…
The corrugated concrete surface consisted of bush hammered vertical ridges of concrete spaced apart evenly throughout the exterior and interior of the building. This was a technique used by Rudolph to construct decoration, this allowed Rudolph to evidence complex, shifting patterns of light and shadow, as well as give texture and depth to the surfaces. Unlike some of the known modernist of that period Rudolph was in favor of ornamenting his buildings as he stated in Perspecta 7 “the moving shadows cast from the concrete ridges and the shining, glittering aggregate added ornamental complexity.” Rudolph combined structure, decoration and sculpture as one element in the A&A recalling the past when decoration was a part of the actual building. The masculine forcefulness of the large corrugated concrete masses transformed Rudolph’s architectural character in the A&A comparing it to Sullivan and that is the characteristic of the building as being a