Yale Art and Architecture Building

As you may recall from this previous post about the Beinecke Library at Yale, my studio made a trip to New Haven, Connecticut a few weeks ago.  The site for our project this semester is in New Haven, near the Yale Campus, right behind the Yale Center for British Art, and we took advantage of the beautiful day to wander around and look at some of the great buildings in the area.

Our first stop was the Yale Art and Architecture Building, designed by Paul Rudolph and completed in 1963.

I usually find such Brutalist buildings to be a bit too....well...brutal, but not so with this one.  I felt that same soft, whispering voice that I encountered last on my trip to the Robie House.  That sense you get with some buildings that they are alive, and have thoughts and stories to share with you. I can't figure out what that voice is, where it comes from.  Is it the materials?  Maybe it was all that warm, textured concrete. Is it related to the scale of the spaces?  The light? It may take me my whole life to figure it out.