While regarded as one of Eero Saarinen's most distinctive works during his short career, the Morse and Ezra Stiles Colleges at Yale University (1958–62) in New Haven have long seemed more appealing in photographs than in real life. Part of the reason is the surrounding competition: When you walk past the chunky, textured stone of the Collegiate Gothic residential colleges designed by James Gamble Rogers from 1925 to 1934, it's a little hard to adore the pasty, raw concrete and stone aggregate surfaces of Saarinen's stolid clusters. Even Vincent Scully, master of Morse College from 1969 to 1975, admits, “I liked Rogers's Branford and Berkeley better, but I didn't have a choice. [Yale president] Kingman Brewster assigned me to Morse because of my association with modern architecture.”
Saarinen, who had studied at Yale in the 1930s, was aware of Yale's obsession with residential Collegiate Gothic (or Georgian) quadrangles, many of which were coming to completion while he was there. By the time Saarinen got the commission to design Morse and Stiles in the late 1950s, he had studied such historic settings as Italy's village of San Gimignano and the Campo in Siena. His scheme for the Yale colleges featured four-story housing punctuated by a 10-story tower and a 14-story one. The complex embraced a grassy crescent courtyard, hemmed on the other side by Tower Parkway. Saarinen intended the complex at the western edge of campus to be a porous village, with pathways allowing more freedom of pedestrian movement than found in the enclosed quadrangles. But by the late 1960s, with student unrest, town-gown problems, and the admission of women, the village turned into a castle keep under lock and key.
You have 0 complimentary articles remaining.
Unlimited access + premium benefits for as low as $1.99/month.