What do architects Louis Kahn, Paul Rudolph, and Eero Saarinen have in common? Yes, they were all masters of 20th-century architecture. In addition, they were all affiliated with—and designed buildings for—Yale University. With Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past, author Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen further enriches our understanding of these figures by asserting that, beyond an institutional affiliation, what binds them and a handful of other key architects, artists, and historians is a “shared penchant for conflating the past, present, and future in their work and words.” Rather than view modernity as a rejection of the past, they adopted an “untimely” approach that jettisoned chronology as they investigated art and architecture’s relationship to history and time. Pelkonen dubs this group the “untimely moderns” and proposes that, between the 1920s and 1970s, Yale offered a uniquely attuned environment for their multidisciplinary explorations.
In Untimely Moderns, Pelkonen—assistant dean and professor at the Yale School of Architecture—presents her argument in three sections, each broken into chapters. Part one, titled “Constancy and Change,” introduces the intellectual and physical conditions that fostered the untimely moderns’ investigations. Pelkonen begins with Everett Victor Meeks, chair of the Department of Architecture and dean of the Yale School of Fine Arts from 1922 through 1947, who established a “dual curriculum” that balanced technical instruction (studio) and liberal arts–based education (history and criticism). With this pedagogical platform, Meeks sought to instill a sense of continuity between past and present in the midst of a rapidly progressing world. Yale’s campus was changing as well during these years; the “Modern Gothic” idiom adopted by architect James Gamble Rogers for Yale’s expansive building campaign likewise grappled with—and prompted heated debates about—how architecture should relate to bygone eras.
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