BRUTALISM | PAUL RUDOLPH’S YALE ART & ARCHITECTURE BUILDING Paul Rudolph’s Yale Art & Architecture Building – now known as Rudolph Hall in honour of the original architect – is “an imposing, fortress-like building that juxtaposes masses of textured concrete with layers of steel-framed glazing.” 38 (Contrary to commonly held ideas about Brutalism, the style is also characterised using steel and glazing, as demonstrated in the Hunstanton School designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, the proponents of ‘New Brutalism’ in England in the early 1950s.) The building rises seven storeys and has 37 changes in floor level, with two large skylights to facilitate natural light. 39 Both the exterior and interior concrete surfaces have undergone a process of ‘bush-hammering’ to create a ribbed or even corduroy effect. 40 Pell notes that such treatment of the concrete met with criticism at the time for being “too effeminate, too dangerously close to overt expressionism and ornament for an otherwise robust, Modernist structure.” 41 This ‘bush-hammering’ technique seems a departure from earlier Brutalist techniques to imbue the material of concrete with texture by maintaining the markings left by timber formwork.
Jessica Mairs, "Brutalist Buildings: Yale Art and Architecture Building, Connecticut by Paul Rudolph," https://www.dezeen.com/2014/09/26/yale-art-and-architecture-buildingpaul-rudolph-brutalism/. 39 Atlas of Brutalist Architecture, ed. Virginia McLeod and Clare Churly (New York: Phaidon Press, 2018), 71. 40 Ibid. 41 Pell, The Articulate Surface: Ornament and Technology in Contemporary Architecture, 7. 38
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