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 almost 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 take up many of Scully’s topics in greater detail. Erik Vogt, an architect and planner, first focuses on the scriptural basis for New Haven’s nine-square plan of 1638, unique in the English colonies, and on its founders’ conviction that an advanced educational institution was necessary to the fulfillment of their Puritan mission. That goal was realized almost eighty years later, in 1717, when Connecticut’s fledgling college moved from Saybrook to New Haven, raising its first building on land overlooking the town green (and conveyed to the college by New Haven’s First Congregational Church). Vogt’s second essay on the subsequent rise and fall of Yale’s Brick Row—only Connecticut Hall remains—documents how the town continued to influence the early siting of dormitories and academic halls, uniting the greens of town and campus with elms that grew to magnificence by the mid-nineteenth century. His meticulous reconstruction drawing appears on the cover, showing New Haven under a blanket of snow as a bird flying over the campus might have seen it.

Catherine Lynn’s three-part essay takes up the story in the post-Civil War era, as Yale began to withdraw from New Haven behind walls of fortress-like Gothic buildings. Stone masonry replaced the brick of the old Row, now scorned as too similar to the local factories manned by a new immigrant citizenry. Lynn, a historian, traces Yale’s erratic architectural moves over seventy years of expansion beyond its original campus: from Victorian building experiments that soon suffered wholesale demolition, to a brief institutional enthusiasm for grand classical monuments, to a period of relatively routine construction in the Collegiate Gothic mode. Much of this was instructive prelude to the architectural achievements of James Gamble Rogers and a generation of Yale alumni architects who, during the depths of the Great Depression, used Yale’s newly endowed wealth to transform their alma mater yet again. Another major prelude to Yale’s building boom of the 1930s were two grand plans published early in the century, but never realized: New Haven’s Civic Improvement Plan of 1910, by Cass Gilbert and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and John Russell Pope’s plan of 1919 for a greatly expanded Yale campus. Both are discussed in essays by Erik Vogt.

Paul Goldberger, architecture critic of The New Yorker and Dean of Parsons School of Design, contributes the essay on Rogers’s masterpieces at Yale – the residential colleges, Sterling Memorial Library, the Sterling Law Buildings, and the Hall of Graduate Studies. Exploring the relationship of their closed quadrangles to the city’s streets, assessing the ways Rogers coped with the contradictory goals of civic generosity and institutional privacy, his is a timely topic. Even as Yale is thinking globally, it is yet again reshaping its ties to New Haven and building to support its newly reemphasized local obligations.

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