Yale in New Haven: Architecture and Urbanism

In this first major book devoted to the history of Yale s architecture and planning, four authors explore the physical shaping and reshaping of a great university that for over three centuries has been entangled with the idealism, ambition, and fate of its host city. The catalyst for much of the scholarly work is Vincent Scully, who grew up in New Haven when it was dominated by mighty factories, studied at Yale when James Gamble Rogers’s Gothic colleges were still very new, became an influential member of the art history faculty soon after the Second World War, and is still teaching at Yale. Scully introduces the present critical history with an incisive overview of the architectural relationship between Yale and New Haven and concludes it with a memoir assessing Yale’s widely influential modern building program, which has profoundly affected the course of American architecture and planning. He follows these themes through New Haven’s redevelopment projects of the 1960s, subsequent urban problems, and Yale’s recent role in the city s revitalization.Six other essays– by Catherine Lynn, Erik Vogt, and Paul Goldberger– take up many of Scully s topics in greater detail: the scriptural basis for New Haven’s nine-square plan of 1638, unique in the English colonies; the rise and fall of Yale s Brick Row, designed by John Trumbull and James Hillhouse; the university’s Victorian building experiments and brief enthusiasm for grand classical monuments; New Haven s Civic Improvement Plan of 1910, by Cass Gilbert and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.; John Russell Pope s plan of 1919 for a greatly expanded Yale campus; and the relationship of Rogers’s closed quadrangles to the city’s streets, with an assessment of the ways Rogers coped with the contradictory goals of civic generosity and institutional privacy. Fully illustrated with 47 color and 288 black-and-white images.