If you were interested in modern architecture in the 1970s, and you wanted to see what the country’s leading designers were doing, you came to New Haven. The city, a museum of modern architecture, offered buildings of all types and scales created by the first generation of starchitects in the United States: Gordon Bunshaft, Louis Kahn, Charles Moore, Paul Rudolph, Eero Saarinen, Robert Venturi, and many others. Fifty years later, the radicals are middle-aged, and some of these buildings have become the elder statesmen of modernism. Others have faded from public interest, and one significant project has been demolished.
Brown explores the story of New Haven’s embrace of modern architecture during this period, with special attention to the two low-income housing projects that were commissioned by Mayor Dick Lee in the 1960s: Crawford Manor, designed by Rudolph, and Church Street South, designed by Moore and razed in 2018.
This program is presented through the generosity of the Terry F. Green 1969 Fund for British Art and Culture.
Top image
Marisa Angell Brown, photo by Susan Fisher
Extended reading
On Center: The Late Architectural Philosophy of Louis I. Kahn as Expressed in the Yale Center for British Art
Written by Jules David Prown
The Architecture of the Yale Center for British Art
Written by Jules David Prown
Louis I. Kahn in Conversation: Interviews with John W. Cook and Heinrich Klotz, 1969–70
Edited by Jules David Prown and Karen E. Denavit
