d 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 accepted that each building should fit in with the existing urban pattern, and that before starting to design it was important to understand the civic contribution a site made to the established city environment. He considered that a town was an evolving and mixed collection of buildings each with its own function and purpose, linked by pedestrian and vehicular routes that had already created their own meaningful spaces and human experiences, and he believed that these could not be significantly altered. An understanding, therefore, of the existing hierarchies, already predetermined by the existing buildings, by the character and scale of the varying public spaces and by the role each site and building played within the townscape, were to him the essence of civic design: ‘All these complementary activities make up the whole city, which is therefore greater than simply the sum of its parts.’ (9)
Here was an important extension of his design ideas, that the character of a modern building should take its neighborhood into consideration; it should be sympathetic to or purposely contrast with its surroundings. It should not ignore its environment. Clearly it is possible to achieve harmony with its adjacent buildings, even those of a different style, if there is a similarity of scale, proportion, materials and particularly of heights and aesthetic characteristics.
These were the contextual principles which Rudolph adopted in his design for the Mary Cooper Jewett Arts Center at Wellesley College. A building that soared above its neighbors for no good architectural reason would of course dominate them and could destroy the continuity of the campus or, in another context, damage the established character of the streetscape. There is therefore little aesthetic advantage in disrupting these important urban relationships unless it is to give emphasis to a focal building. The unity of a project set properly in its context was recognized as being an important design factor in these major projects.
Paul Rudolph achieved a sens