Beinecke Library at night

The New York Sun has a nice piece on how Yale is rebuilding its modernist architecture, including some truly lovely buildings—the Yale Art Gallery, Ingalls Rink, and Beineke Library, all of which, in my opinion, are distinctive and beautiful.

(Yale’s architecture may be more interesting and daring than Harvard’s as a result of its being in much-maligned New Haven, and thus less tradition-bound and freer to experiment, than Harvard in Cambridge. A silver lining of life in a post-WWII city, I suppose.)

Yale is also restoring one building that it is hard to believe will ever be anything but a monstrosity—the cold and Soviet-style Art and Architecture building, by Paul Rudolph. Well, let them try; it can only help. At the very least, they’ll put some air conditioning in the thing.