urban island with buildings and canyons that dwarfed the ship. That image, and the sheer excitement of seeing those glittering towers for the first time, is still with me. The New Haven local paper had sent a reporter out on the pilot’s boat to interview us, as a young couple arriving fresh in New York, and we felt self-conscious, almost like ambassadors for the youth of Europe.
We were on our way to Yale. I was taking up a Fulbright scholarship to study for my master’s degree, and Su had a scholarship to study city planning. After the AA, I had been torn between applying for a scholarship in Rome, which I knew and loved, and going to America. But I knew deep down that Rome was the past; America was the future. Yale looked close enough to New York, offered a Louis Kahn building even if Kahn himself had moved on, and was on the sea. Or so we thought – the sea was completely blocked off by industry and naval yards. I never even saw it in the year I was there.
New York had an incredible energy, richness and vitality in the early 1960s. It was the Athens of the mid-twentieth century, the epicentre of modern art, of modern architecture, of modern music. We listened to jazz, blues and rock and roll – Charlie Parker, Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Modern Jazz Quartet, Elvis Presley – exciting music that seemed a world away from English jazz or skiffle. We saw works by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning – the artists who were changing painting around the world. We read Marcuse’s critiques of consumerism and Adorno on commodified culture. England had only finished rationing a few years earlier, was adapting painfully to its post-colonial future, and felt austere in spirit if not in policy. By comparison, the vigour and prosperity of America, where a 43-year-old John F. Kennedy had just taken office as President, were palpable. The streets were full of people from every country, as London’s are today. It was clearly the capital of the world.
Paul Rudolph, our professor at Yale, standing in front of the rough concrete wall of his Yale Art and Architecture Building.
Rudolph’s 1953 Walker Guest House on Sanibel Island, Florida. Before coming to Yale, Rudolph was a leading light in the ‘Sarasota School’, whose delicate architecture drew me to study with him.
After a few days of being escorted round New York like minor celebrities, we made it to Yale’s campus, where I had two less pleasant shocks. The first was that the campus was designed as a strange pastiche of a Victorian Oxbridge college, with Gothic revival buildings arranged around grassy quadrangles, and strange secret fraternities for the privileged few. This was a complete contrast to the rest of the town, which was a study in urban dereliction, with the worst poverty and drug problems of the east coast. Town and gown seemed to be forever at each other’s throats. It was only when it became clear that the state of the city was pushing faculty and students away that Yale started to embrace rather than ignore its urban setting.
The second shock was delivered by Paul Rudolph, the professor, when I met him on the stairs on my first day. I introduced myself. He looked unimpressed: ‘We are already four days into term. Your first assignment is due in ten days. You need to pass it, or you’re out.’
After the ruminative intellectual atmosphere of the AA, the relentless pace at Yale showed us what hard work architecture could be; 80- to 100-hour weeks, working through the night, grabbing a few hours rest on the battered leather sofa in the studio. There were 13 of us in the class – about two-thirds American and one-third British – and we would be there day and night. It was an architectural boot camp; students did not so much fail as physically collapse.
Rudolph’s early work in and around Sarasota, Florida, had drawn me to Yale. These delicate lightweight houses and school buildings, inspired by his experience as a naval architect during the war, used materials minimally and made the most of natural lighting and ventilation. Rudolph taught us for the first semester. He had a brilliant analytical mind, and influenced all of us, Norman Foster in particular. He also kept late hours; he was busy designing his brutalist masterpiece, the Yale Art and Architecture Building, at the same time as teaching. He drove himself every bit as hard as he drove us.
Louis Kahn’s Richards Medical Research Laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
The laboratories are the clearest expression of Khan’s distinction between ‘served’ and ‘servant’ spaces. The three laboratory towers have open, unobstructed floors and windows to let in natural light. They are grouped round a central service core housing air intakes and elevators. Each laboratory tower is also supported by air extractors and stairways, contained in external shafts.
It was an introduction to the different pace of American life. People took pride in not having holidays or stopping for lunch, in contrast to Europe, where everything used to shut for several hours at lunchtime (Renzo Piano told me plainly when we first met, ‘I don’t talk work when I’m eating.’), and for the whole of August.
It was also a complete contrast to the theoretical ambience of the AA. There was little time for that in Rudolph’s world; it was all about production, and about appearance. On one occasion we were discussing cars, and I was debating how they could safely share streets with pedestrians. Rudolph felt I was missing the point; he was more interested in how the cars looked, and the composition their different colours would create when viewed from above. The contrast between the English and American approaches found expression in friendly rivalry between the students too. The Americans put up a banner saying ‘Do More’; the English contingent responded with one saying ‘Think More’.
Yale opened the door to new influences, both inside and outside the hothouse atmosphere of the Arts Building, temporary home of the architecture school. This concrete and brick building, with services integrated into its honeycombed ceiling, was one of Louis Kahn’s earliest commissions. It had a confidence and weight to its concrete floorplates, its handling of geometry and order, and its elegant central staircase.
We went to see Kahn himself lecture in Pennsylvania, where he had moved a few years before. Kahn’s poetic sensibility set him apart from the previous generation. He was the first great post-war architect, and a huge influence on Norman Foster and me, an inspirational lecturer and a great teacher. He talked poetically of the nature of materials and the respect that architects owed them, of the relationship between architecture and music, of space and silence, of asking a brick what it wanted to be in a building. His intellectual analysis of the distinction between served spaces, the functional rooms and spaces of buildings, and servant spaces, the spaces and rooms that support them (staircases, toilets, ventilation ducts and so on) made a deep impression on me. His best-known buildings came later, and at their best – the Richards Medical Research Laboratories in Philadelphia, for example, and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California – they were stunning.
James Stirling also came to lecture at Yale, and became a close friend. Jim was the bright hope of British modernist architecture and the first to emerge from under the shadow of giants like Aalto, Mies and Corb. We had good architects, but we’d never managed to develop a distinct architectural movement. Working with James Gowan, Jim devised a modernist British vernacular, combining standardised industrial materials – red brick, standard window sections, industrial glazing – structural inventiveness, and a sense of architectural rhythm and lightness that brought life to the façades of his buildings.
