Leaving New Haven

This is the 3rd, and most definitely final, post on New Haven. There's a few buildings I wanted to see and didn't, for various reasons, including Rudolf's Crawford Manor and the interior of the Sterling Library, so I might still get a chance to post about them individually. The picture above is of the Prague subway-ish foot tunnel below New Haven train station.

I bought a guide book this time too in a bid to avoid embarrassing displays of architectural ignorance, so expect clunking pieces of factual information strewn amidst the usual flippant nonsense.

I'll start here with the view from my hotel room window of Rudolph's Temple Street Parking Garage (completed 1961, capacity 1280 cars), mentioned before and included again because it's the first time I've really been able to convey the vast scale of the building. The other thing evident in this shot is the fabulous roof-scape of miniature buildings and concrete lamp posts that look like wilting flowers, of which more later.



A photo essay of New Haven wouldn't be complete without a visit to VSBA's Dixwell Fire Station. This is officially the first ever building with a 'peeled-off corner', a device which became a cliche of Post Modernism but had one of those curiously Venturian justifications here. It's 'required' in order to get the overscaled lettering to fit the facade facing the main street, although it's clearly the case that the text was strategically sized in order to make this circumstantial gesture necessary.



One thing that puzzles people about Venturi and Scott Brown's buildings is that they really are quite ordinary. Viewed in architecture books hey have a kind of residual glamour, but seen in context they are completely at home and, almost, unremarkable. This is meant as a compliment. There is a subtlety and 'rightness' to their proportions though, even when they are deliberately wrong, that gives them a tension with their surroundings. Even so, if you spend too much time staring at this building people tend to come up to you and ask if you're lost. Or if your house is on fire.



There's also some nice low key topiary going on around the edge, and you can't say that about the Barcelona Pavilion.



Nearby is this bizarre thing, a power station built to fit in to a Greek Revival style neighbourhood now entirely demolished. In Europe, and particularly in the UK, industrial buildings from the 19th and very early 20th centuries were routinely disguised as castles and temples. This is part of the same tradition, I suppose, although it is somehow less romantic about its artifice. Unfortunately smoke doesn't emit from the twin spires although it may have once.



On the subject of artifice, I have said relatively little about the older campus buildings. They are, in parts, deeply strange, as bizarre as anything dreamt up by Anton Faust or other plunderers of the gothic. But, despite their artifice in recreating a new super-sized version of Oxbridge, you get used to them remarkably quickly.



Take a second look at this and it's actually pretty bizarre. It's also strangely plausible. Unusually too for an American city - save New York - the central campus areas of New Haven are essentially pedestrian. Between the blocks carved out by roads, the colleges unfold as a series of interlinked courts.



I'd say that the urban morphology of the campus was highly permeable if it wasn't for the fact that I would have to kill myself afterwards.



Many of the more contemporary buildings tend to ignore such picturesque niceties. Marcel Breuer's Bekton lab, for instance, sits aloof on it's own raised plaza and refuses to pass the port in the right direction.



The back of it is almost completely windowless too, making the building a scaleless, abstract object like a bit of detailing or piece of fabric pattern, blown up to a huge size.



Philip Johnson's Kline Laboratory building attempts a (broadly) modernist updating of the courtyard theme. Around the edge is a continuous colonnade that pulls together various disparate buildings into a formal whole. They sit at the top of a steep hill and this, combined with the slightly gargantuan scale, means the space has the feel of a corporate plaza rather than an informal college courtyard.



It has an odd effect too on the other buildings, suggesting that they all sit on the fat brick piloti that support the concrete awning.

The laboratory tower itself is reminiscent of Michael Graves' (much) later buildings with its chunky stripped-classical columns and slit like windows. It lies at the queasy intersection between a De Chiroco-esque distilled evocation of the classical city and bombastic neo-fascism.

Inside it's pretty grim, although not totally awful. The library is given the best space, sunk into the podium at the bottom of a double height atrium and crossed by bridges. Despite this the whole place has the air of a particularly cruel penitentiary.

Johnson's tower is oddly off axis with Hillhouse Avenue, the street running up to the mound on which it stands. From a distance it appears to be hiding, slightly bashfully, off centre-stage.



A view of Michael Hopkins' newly opened Kroon Forestry Studies building. Like a lot of Hopkins' recent projects (see Portcullis House) it has an overall weirdness which can't be contained by the Anglo Saxon rectitude of the detailing. On the outside it is clad in a skin of very new looking sandstone that is pulled away from the facade in order to make a colonnade but also to articulate - in the accepted manner - that it is not actually holding anything up. This gives the windows a voided look too in keeping with Hopkins recent goth tendencies.



Occasionally he has peeled away the stone cladding in a mock-ruinous manner in order to further reveal the artifice of the construction. He's obviously been listening to a lot of Sisters of Mercy.



Inside it is part high-tech and part Arts and Crafts with nods to the heroic Yale campus buildings of the '50's and '60's. The fare-faced concrete and fine honed timber is indebted to Kahn's British Art Centre, but the building itself is like a huge barn, more greenfield campus than urban. This is also an unflattering photo of an interesting space and the vault at the top of the building is lovely.



The high-tech meets arts and crafts theme continues with the fetishisation of glulam technology and big bolts.



Just down the hill from both Johnson and Hopkins is SOM's former Watson Astronomy Centre building which sits enigmatically behind its ivy filled moat.

Sitting at the bottom of Hillhouse Avenue is the very bizarre Cloister Hall. There are many things to enjoy about this including the stone gable superimposed on the tile one behind and the vaguely grotesque bay window bursting like a malignant growth on the left hand side.



This is a remarkable object, a cartoon piece of classical whimsy where everything is a bit fatter and rounder than it needs to be, like a bouncy castle carved out of real stone. The dummy windows are highly embellished blanks while the real ones are more low-key and largely hidden by vegetation.

It also has some very strange asymmetrical columns adding to a general sense that it might be several buildings cut and put back together in the wrong order. Or a building that got dressed in the dark.

I like a Dutch gable. And some rustication. This has both and is by McKim, Mead and White. Architecture criticism doesn't get much more sophisticated than this.

Strange, heraldic brickwork, sometimes incorporating the word Yale covered this building....I've no idea what the other signs mean although they may be something to do with a secret society.



Speaking of which, I risked my life taking this shot. It's the mysterious Skull and Bones Secret Society "Tomb". I half expected Robert DeNiro to suddenly appear beside me a la The Good Shepherd and tap me up for CIA membership. The Skull and Bones is mostly the subject of amusement rather than awe at Yale, although it still has strong links to political power. Both Bush presidents were members, as was John Kerry and Obama's current economics advisor. The building is attributed to Henry Austin who added various other bits of neo-Egyptian architecture to the campus.



The Gordon Bunshaft designed Bienecke Rare Book library appears like a colossal but very un-aerodynamic spaceship that has just landed amidst Yale's neo-medieval campus.

The library is a windowless concrete framed casket where the marble infill panels are sliced so thinly that they let light through into the interior. It sits enigmatically in a granite plaza from which the building's columns seem to grow.



The soffit around the entrance is notably low and hangs slightly menacingly above your head as you enter.

The inside is very beautiful and has a misty quality reminiscent of Renaissance churches where the precise edges of the room are hard to make out. The strangely corporate furnishings though also give it the feel of a sensationally upmarket hotel lobby.



This it turns out is by Charles Moore, or at least the office of Moore and Turnbull. When it was completed the air-conditioning grills to each apartment were painted in different colours, although they have faded now leaving the building unremittingly grim. My guide book said something about the top row of windows forming a vestigial cornice, which is generous.



Across an asphalt car park from the Moore building is this somewhat creepily blank church with a roller shutter entrance door...



...guarded by someone in this little hut who's been using a lot of gas.



I took this shot for Lang Rabbie, who asked in a comment to a previous post whether Kevin Roche and John Dinkerloo's Yale Nursing School was still there. It is, although it appears to be sinking.



Back on the roof of Rudolf's car park I got very into the concrete folly-like service towers. The lean to greenhouse is new I assume but the bright mosaic tiles are original. The lamp posts are also very elegant, made as if from a thin strip of concrete that has been peeled apart like a banana...



The interior is fabulous vortex of clashing concrete decks and vaulted tunnels and an excellent location for a car chase.



The height of the roof is also almost exactly aligned with the various church steeples that sit along Temple Street (so called for that reason), giving them an odd, almost domestic quality when viewed so close up.

A seagull gazes mournfully out across New Haven towards the port and Marcel Breuer's vacant former Armstrong Rubber Company building stranded by the freeway. Next to it is a vast Ikea which sometimes uses Breuer's building as a billboard.

And finally, a shot back to the good old Omni Hotel. I shall miss its heavily patterned interior and scarily large apples in the lobby.

I Love The Sound Of Raking Grass

View of the Tower of London from the air, 1945 (English Heritage -NMR Archives)

The BBC’s Britain From Above is currently viewable on iplayer. Last weeks short film charted London’s development since the second world war via aerial photography. At the end of the war the RAF undertook an extensive photographic survey of the capital and this is used as the jumping off point for an analysis of how the city has changed (or not as it turns out) since then.

The remarkable thing about London is how the various visionary proposals for rebuilding its bomb damaged areas failed to transform its ancient street pattern. Plans to redesign large chunks of it, such as Abercrombie’s plan for London as a network of parks, simply never happened. The isolated pockets of post-war housing have failed to impact at the scale of the aerial survey.



Abercrombie, Park System of London (via London Landscape web)

Also interesting in the immediately post war film footage is the presence of inner city allotments that sprang up on bomb-sites in the wake of food shortages and rationing. These parasitic community gardens are particularly provocative in relation to contemporary thinking about sustainable communities and ideas of localised food production and small-scale agriculture.

Allotments colonising the inner city is a kind of reverse urbanism, suggesting a merging of country and city rather than the rigid divide (both conceptually and literally) of planners such as the Urban Task Force. The foundation of much of the protesting against London’s expansion and the various Eco villages is based on two principles: Increased densification of the inner city, and the maintenance of the green belt. This in turn is based on a highly architectural desire to distinguish city and non-city, or figure and ground, and preserve the distinction between city, suburb and country. Sprawl, especially suburban sprawl is the enemy. This is often as much a conceptual problem as a literal one, almost as if the all important civitas of the city could leak out and disappear into the water table unless carefully hemmed in.



A looser definition of the city and non-city, or a merging of the two, might allow for new types of spaces, which in turn might alter relationships between people, infrastructure and travel. Allotments in the inner city have a corollary with opera houses in the suburbs, a scenario which could, perversely, allow more sustainable community based activities to grow.

Perhaps too there is an answer here to the problem of hipster urbanism, ‘regeneration’ which is actually a kind of class cleansing. In this, the city merely becomes a fashionistas playground and part time home for the super rich. The hip aura of somewhere like Hoxton (or wherever, scene watching pedants!) relies on its status as the ultimate in urban edginess, an anti-suburbia. Remove the distinction and……

Still Got Love For the Streets

These various fragments are connected in my mind by recent conversations regarding the legacy of The Smithson’s ‘streets in the sky’ and how these might intersect with current ideas of public space. In particular, the Smithson’s notion of streets in the sky was based on their close reading of street life in London’s east end and therefore on an idea of public space that is used, useful but non-prescriptive. Their idea of the content of public space therefore seemed to acknowledge the various lives that might be lived within it. Crucially therefore it avoided the formalist gesture of the piazza in favour of a more subtle elaboration of the street. So….

Down and out in Paris…

At least since the1850’s when Baron Houssmann designed the wide boulevards of central Paris at least partly in order to make it easier for troops to quell insurrection, the public space of the street has also been a space of social control. Or, possibly, the lack of definition of the street has made social control of it an issue. Some seventy years after Haussmann, Le Corbusier proposed his Ville Radieuse, in many way a radical upping of Hausmann’s anti. The Ville Radieuse proposed the wholesale demolition of the centre of Paris, to be replaced by towers standing majestically in ordered parkland splendour. The justifications for this radical measure where similar to Haussmann’s stated aims: increased sanitation, clean air, light, space and the privileging of visual order. Le Corbusier justified his audacious proposal by suggesting, at least implicitly, that the radical reconfiguration of the traditional city would result in a more stable social order. Towards A New Architecture ends with the reactionary warning: “Architecture or revolution”. In some ways it couldn’t be clearer. In the formal chaos of the city are fermented the seeds of social insurrection. Architecture can design them away.

Owen Hatherley has alerted me to the closing, in 1997, of the escalator access to the roof of the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The democratic pretensions of the Pompidou lie both in the rhetoric of flexibility implied and in some cases made possible by its technology and, more tangibly, in the moving streets in the sky offered by the escalators that ride up its side. Even streets in the sky need policing. Too much freedom is clearly a bad thing.

…and London

“…if we would court their presence, we have only to take care that they find multitudes living in lanes and alleys in which there is no drainage, or in which the drainage is inefficient, where open cesspools and accumulated heaps of a filth unnamable abound.’

In this quote from an 1847 letter to the Times regarding the ‘rookerie’ slums of London, it's not clear whether its people or diseases that are being referred to.

The late, great Robin Evans wrote that the demolition and redevelopment of London’s rookeries, ostensibly motivated by the desire to improve sanitary and hygiene conditions was also motivated by a fear of what the rookeries bred. It was felt that their congested spaces and visual inaccessibility made them the natural home of immoral acts. Their back alleys and complex warren like configuration made them hard to police, but, more than that, was seen to actively encourage a similar covertness of mind and behaviour.

Regent Street is one of the few pieces of formal urban planning in London. This fact is often seen as being to the detriment of London and its inability to think strategically and ambitiously about urban space. The medieval street pattern is somehow evidence of a lack of clarity and vision. When John Nash designed Regent Street he employed the classical colonnade to front his crescents and villas. The colonnade is a device ideal for loitering. It offers shelter and a space to wander and stop to talk. Knowing this, but fearful of the vagabonds and vagrants who would hang around the front doors of the residents of Portland Place, Nash made a cunning modification. He removed the section of street immediately under the colonnade and replaced it with fenced off steps to the basements of the houses. The colonnade thus became a symbol divorced from its function of offering shelter. Not only did Nash provide visual order to the chaos of central London, but he designed out the possibility of undesirables hanging around in them. Nash was the polar opposite of his contemporary John Soane. Contrast the efficient order and social engineering of Nash's terraces with the dark perversity and bewildering labyrinthine passages of Soane's own house in Lincoln's Inn Fields.

Up, down, turn around, please don't let me hit the ground.

Some 130 years later another large area of London was cleared and re-planned: the South Bank. Here though the much criticised lack of legibility, their lack of traditional urban clarity, lends the spaces a looseness of interpretation. They may not move but, like the original intention for the Pompdiou, the terraces and aerial walkways of the South Bank encourage a a kind of exhilarating freedom of movement. Leading up, down, all around, the buildings become a kind of landscape to be climbed on and over as well as through. Adrian Forty has noted the inherently democratic nature of the plan of the Royal Festival Hall. He suggests persuasively that the enormous foyer space that occupies almost the entire ground floor is a truly public space because no reason or justification is required to be there. The design of this space means that far from being simply a feeder space for the main event, the auditorium or the ticket qeue (which is after all what all public buildings have) it is the main event itself. It is one of the most generous and open and uncontrolled spaces in the city. It is an extension of those other streets in the sky of the Southbank, a square in the sky maybe, but also, with its carpeted walkways and stairs, more like a living room in the sky.

Standing in the Way of Control

The visual and spatial order of the idealised city is also a tool in the production of a corresponding social order. I have written before about Gillet Square in Hackney and its received and idealised notions of public space. These spaces anticipate similarly idealised notions of behaviour. As an architect involved in designing new housing I am told that public space should be surveyed and bounded. Cabe’s Building for Life standards and the police’s Secured by Design guides both attempt to design out spaces which could be used for loitering or anti-social behaviour. This is common sense and eminently reasonable. Like all common sense and eminently reasonable things it leaves little room for the unreasonable and the illicit. As a teenager going to school in suburban Essex, spaces for loitering and anti-social behaviour were exactly the spaces I sought out. These were the spaces of illicit activity, places which only teenagers and other people not engaged in ‘proper’ activities can hang out. Improper, unsupervised, visually un-surveyed spaces.

The painter George Shaw has documented these kind of in-between and left over spaces – allotments, garage lock-ups, the bits of scrubland left over when new estates are built – the kinds of places no one designs. In its loose fit, its lack of identity and its formlessness these spaces allow certain things, things designed out of the rest of our environment, to happen. They serve a kind of purpose and are home to something. The conventions of urban design, seemingly benign, are also driven by a desire to purge, to clean up. The social neuroticism of the John Pawson interior occurs on an urban level too. The Smithson’s streets in the sky at least seem to contain things. French film stars mainly but also prams, people, milk floats, football games, the detritus of life. The urge to clear away, to sweep unmentionables out is a profoundly strong one in architecture.

It’s hard to make a case for bad design, but equally hard to escape the notion that too much ‘good design’ might be bad for the soul. Architects and urbanists, tragically, are never allowed to get down with their bad selves. They always feel the compelling need to improve, to sort out problems, to make the world better. Sometimes though, its better when its badly designed. When its a bit wrong.