Robert A. M. Stern ’65 M.ARCH.,
Dean of Yale School of Architecture
This is a very beautiful book, lavishly illustrated with seldom seen historic
old photographs as well as gorgeous new drawings by Erik Vogt, one of the authors.
For these alone, everyone who cares about Yale and New Haven should take pleasure
in Yale in New Haven. But the book is much more than a visual treat. The work
of four scholars, it is a thoroughly researched, engaging, provocative, sometimes
iconoclastic record of the physical history of the University and its host city.
Meticulous in its scholarship, especially in the accounts of the University’s
first two hundred years, Yale in New Haven should appeal not only to architects
and planners but also to anyone interested in the University’s evolution.
Moreover, given that Yale, among the nation’s oldest universities, is the
one most firmly embedded in its city, Yale in New Haven should be welcomed by urban-based
educators and planners no matter their institution or city.
Yale in New Haven is a superb history of architecture and urbanism. It is also
an excellent history of the ideas that governed Yale as a whole—its pedagogy
and its self-identity as an institution. Even more than the architects responsible
for the buildings, the patrons who paid for them and especially the university
Presidents and other leading officers who negotiated the gifts are vividly brought
to life as individuals. So this is a work of architectural history and of urban
history and of institutional history.
Yale, as the authors point out, has rebuilt itself in each of its three centuries.
The modest and eminently coherent red brick college of the eighteenth century
was replaced by the rampant individualism of the nineteenth century with works
by some of its finest architects including Alexander Jackson Davis and Richard
Morris Hunt, only to be largely replaced in the twentieth century by an internalized
townscape of nearly secret courtyards and gardens punctuated by bold expressions
of collective meaning such as the Harkness Tower, the Payne Whitney Gym, and the
Sterling Library. Since the Second World War, the remarkable collection of early
twentieth-century buildings designed mostly by James Gamble Rogers, which continues
to define Yale for most observers, has been challenged by Modernist work embodying
an individualism that puts the excesses of nineteenth-century Yale in the shade.
The struggle to balance between collective identity and individual expression
which is the essential struggle that Yale faces today as it goes forward with
plans for new buildings, is also, in effect, the physical embodiment of the
essential struggle of life in a democracy. For this reason, Yale in New Haven
is an essential text.
Andres Duany ’74 M.ARCH.
The building of Yale has been a ruthless struggle for excellence. This history
reads like a great American novel; the themes are epic, the plot vigorous, the
characters memorable.
David McCullough ’55
This sumptuous volume could not be more welcome, for all who love architecture
and who love Yale and New Haven. One is reminded what a showcase of architectural
variety Yale has been, and what looming talents have been brought to bear, from
John Trumbull to Louis Kahn to Robert Venturi. The essays by Vincent Scully,
Catherine Lynn, Erik Vogt, and Paul Goldberger are clear-eyed, knowing, and
at times brilliant. The rare old photographs of the Yale that has vanished are
particularly interesting, even haunting. What a marvelous book!
Jaquelin Robertson ’55, ’61 M.ARCH.
Particularly for those fortunate to have experienced Yale and Vincent Scully
as undergraduate and graduate students—different sorts of exposures—this
focus on a significant American “city campus” by its singular muse
is a rare moment indeed in architectural history. Like Joyce in his beloved
Dublin, Scully gives Yale in New Haven a mythic physical presence that changes
forever one’s perception of the place.