Word: gothic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Yalemen, like most collegians, have long dwelt in the shadow of the gargoyle. Gothic architecture, with its encrusted spires and ogives, was the accepted way of making scholarship look more scholarly. But no longer. In the past few years more advanced architecture has risen on Yale's 150 acres in New Haven, Conn., than in all of Manhattan with all its forest of new buildings. Some of the Yale structures are ordinary, but the boldest buildings have succeeded in giving modern architecture a host of new directions...
Instead of picking one official architect-such as James Gamble Rogers, who weighted the campus down with his Girder Gothic of the late 1920s and '30s, Yale turned to a number of the most lustrous and far-out contemporary master builders: Eero Saarinen, Gordon Bunshaft, Paul Rudolph, Philip Johnson and Louis Kahn. They adhered to no single style, only to the modern mood, which freely explores how steel, glass and reinforced concrete can most beautifully be bent to shelter man. Their stunning results have made Yale more of a laboratory than a museum...
...Cheek-by-jowl existed buildings from the colonial brick of Connecticut Hall where Nathan Hale once lived, to Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's dark glass box containing the university's IBM computer center. At one end of the campus is an electricity-generating powerhouse in, of all things, Gothic; not far away is a student dwelling, Davenport College, so eclectic that its street fac.ade is pseudo-Gothic and its courtyard colonial brick...
Between Saloon & Gym. At a time when many college architects around the U.S. were building contemporary campus structures as neat, clean and impersonal as factories, Saarinen decided to come to modern terms with the gargoyle. Given a site over which loomed the 197-ft.-high Gothic gymnasium, he designed his buildings to be "good neighbors." To capture the masonry spirit of nearby older pseudo-Gothic buildings, Saarinen pumped wet concrete into frames that were filled with stones, simulating inexpensively their handcrafted finish...
...hill town of San Gimignano, Saarinen plotted a multilevel alleyway between the two new colleges. Lying between Mory's famed saloon and the gym, this walkway separates the colleges in a cavernous passage while louvered windows peep through sandy slabs. The atmosphere is similar to Yale's Gothic buildings of the 1920s-though one modern-for-modern's-sake critic likens it to a set for Ivanhoe. Determined to avoid the typical cookie-cut module, Saarinen decided that as far as possible no two rooms should be alike. Result: though at first scorned, his Stiles and Morse...