Yale in New Haven: Architecture & Urbanism

By Vincent Scully, Catherine Lynn, Erik Vogt, and Paul Goldberger Yale University Press, 2004, 406 pp., paperback $45. How do you judge whether a university is treating its host city decently? Some focus on how much or how little the university does to support the local community through money and programs. Yale University, which has a $12 billion endowment, has won praise in some quarters for operating the New Haven HomeBuyer Program, which has given $15 million — in subsidies of up to $25,000 per household — to help faculty and staff members buy homes in certain neighborhoods. Yale has also worked with public schools, encouraged biotechnology startup firms, and upgraded the city’s Broadway shopping district (although some New Haveners complain that expensive changes in Yale-owned retail properties have pushed out a number of local merchants and replaced them with national chains). Now comes Yale in New Haven, a book that takes an illuminating look at town-gown relations from the perspective of architecture and urban design. This amply illustrated, large-format volume examines how the campus buildings and open spaces — and especially their relation to streets and sidewalks — have affected the city that has been Yale’s home since 1717. In a series of lucid essays, architectural historian Vincent Scully, architectural historian Catherine Lynn, Miami architect Erik Vogt, and New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger — all of whom have spent years at Yale — explore whether Yale is a good model of urban university development. Until after the Civil War, Yale occupied a series of simple red brick buildings that sat behind lawn, trees, and a wooden fence, largely open to the city’s inhabitants. Scully, a lifelong New Havener who has taught at Yale since 1947, laments that in the late 19th century the university started razing the “Brick Row” and replacing it with a defensive, almost castle-like wall of continuous buildings. The university never left the city’s center, across College Street from the downtown Green, but the campus and the city began to become two distinct worlds. Openings between campus and city became few. Over the years, the university commissioned many fine architects, most notably New Yorker James Gamble Rogers, who from the 1910s through the 1930s designed enchanting Gothic buildings with beautifully crafted walls of stone and brick. Though scoffed at by Modernists in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, Rogers’s buildings are now rightly regarded as marvels. The question that remains is whether Rogers’s buildings and those by other architects excessively walled out the city. The authors make it clear that architects had only a limited choice; they answered to university officials who typically did not want designs that would reach out to the city. In the twenties and thirties, the university was intent on organizing undergraduate living into residential colleges arranged around secluded courtyards. On their perimeters, “garden moats” — better planted 70 years ago than they are today — provided several feet of separation between students’ rooms and city sidewalks. I think Goldberger exaggerates the degree to which Rogers’s buildings are “anti-urban.” Rogers may have reserved his best architectural effects for courtyards rather than for street facades, as Goldberger says, but even so, what’s visible to the public is extraordinarily pleasing. The human scale and imaginative details continually delight passersby. The garden moats, bounded by low walls of stone, brick, and concrete, coexist with city life reasonably well. They allow dormitory rooms to stand comfortably within a few feet of busy sidewalks — in much the same way that the new urbanist practice of raising the windows of city houses a few feet above the sidewalks permits people to live in a compact urban environment without being overly exposed. The needs of the public realm must be balanced against a residential college’s legitimate requirements of privacy and security. This book, sponsored and printed by the university, makes it clear that not all of Yale’s decisions have been good. Nonetheless, the campus is a jewel, one that makes its city a more satisfying place to live. Yale’s techniques are worth studying. P.L.