Though Paul Rudolph’s newly renovated Art and Architecture Building at Yale has emerged as an object of admiration, if not adoration, it generated controversy—­as rough-edged as its bush-hammered concrete shell—from the moment it opened. Anticipated as a great heroic masterwork by the university’s gifted and legendary chairman of architecture, the Art and Architecture (or A&A) Building was greeted from its completion, in 1963, with a decisive mix of acclaim and disdain. While The New York Times architecture critic, Ada Louise Huxtable, praised it as “a spectacular tour de force,” art historian Nikolaus Pevsner, the keynote speaker at the structure’s dedication, disparaged it as a work of an “individualist, the artist-architect, primarily concerned with [his own] self-expression.”

Monumental in its interlocking concrete forms, the building was designed to anchor a key corner site, culminating an architectural procession that includes Yale University Art Gallery, just across the street. With the centripetal force of a pinwheel, the A&A’s massing spins off of four complex concrete towers, with a fifth vertical shaft set to one side to house the elevators and main interior stair. Up a run of front steps that pool metaphorically at the base of the building and nearly disappear into the shadows between two towers, the interior unfolded with a panoply of interlocking spaces and planes—37 different levels terracing through seven stories, a penthouse, and two below-grade levels.