te the functional activities. Unifying the interior of these buildings with major and minor interactive spaces and adapting the exterior character of the building to fit in with its surroundings were both refinements on Rudolph’s original functional training in the International Style. From then on he recognized the need when designing these large projects to respond to the existing urban environment, to understand the contribution his buildings played in the enhancement of the wider public realm and to establish the hierarchies in civic design. It was necessary to fit in with the historical character of the surrounding and adjacent buildings. He acknowledged that a building is not an ‘island’, and that however self-important a new project is, it still plays its part in the architectural drama of the townscape. Although his buildings were always designed from the inside function, from now on they were also molded by their surroundings.
His first large commission which developed this contextual theme was the Mary Cooper Jewett Arts Center for Wellesley College, Massachusetts, a commission that coincided with Rudolph’s appointment as Dean of Architecture at Yale University. The project required him to design a modern building in character with the neo-Gothic campus and tower and was a scheme that needed to relate to these predetermined historic surroundings. His design solution was neither a pastiche nor a replica, but created instead a modern design using the height, scale and proportions of the structure and particularly the rhythm of the sunscreens and roof lights to echo the neo-Gothic features of the existing college.
This project was an important advance in Rudolph’s work because it acknowledged the role that this new building played in the composition of the campus. It had to be a background building that completed a wing of the open courtyard and helped to enhance the focal element in the complex. The focus of attraction was not the new center itself but obviously remained the tall neo-Gothic tower which had historically been the centerpiece of the college. The contextual features of this new background building were architecturally deferential and supported the unifying importance of this central element in the campus.
After the experience of this project Rudolph introduced several other contextual ideas into his work. He was very interested in scale and proportion in architecture. Was a scheme in scale or not with its neighboring buildings? Human scale (in pedestrian areas), inhuman scale (on motorways or in tall buildings), change in scale (between two sides of a building), vertical (alert) or horizontal (relaxed) scale and the different atmosphere created by these circumstances were all to him interesting questions of scale. Even his acceptance of the need to include ornamentation, sculpture and textured materials in modern architecture seemed to stem from the need to humanize the building with identifiable details to produce a scale to which people could relate. Buildings are for people, he would say.
His elevation of the entire length of Chapel Street in New Haven, which was drawn in scale, to show the Art and Architecture Building at Yale University, demonstrated the important contextual role the surrounding buildings and this corner site played in the urban fabric of the town. The drawing helped him design a streetscape building that turned the corner, and it influenced some of the vertical tower features of the building in contrast to the horizontal lines of Louis Kahn’s adjacent art gallery. This concern to fit in sculpturally with the surrounding features, buildings and context became an enduring feature of Rudolph’s work. He endorsed the need for architecture to blend in with its surroundings, to augment or follow what had preceded it. It was necessary to be in-scale with the neighboring buildings, or at the very least, the lower floors of a high building should relate to the urban context. These were sound practical reasons for refining and developing his basic design philosophy as a Modernist.
Rudolph