new haven CT - crawford manor 4 - a photo on Flickriver

Crawford Manor (Paul Rudolph, 1962-1966). This public-housing complex for senior citizens, joined a host of projects whose architects attempted to visually animate high-rise housing without resorting to conventional architectural devices like cornices and historical ornament. In strong light, the effect is clear: the in-and-out massing, and the projecting balconies (varying in orientation) produce strong contrasts between surfaces washed in light and those receding into deep shadow, as well as a little bit of modeling along the curves of the balcony lozenges. (See UMass Dartmouth's Rudolph collection for some key drawings.)

A more-or-less contemporary comparison would be 1199 Plaza, and Rudolph himself returned to this well in the Tracey Towers. Basically, these architects were looking to recreate something in the vein of the Unité d'habitation, on a tighter budget - with Crawford's being the tightest of all these examples. As at Tracey, I wish Rudolph could have found a way to meet the ground less abruptly and more urbanistically, and I can't really comment on the interior space or qualities of the units themselves. But as a sculptural exercise, I think it's fine, and unquestionably an improvement on your classic "brick box" slab.

Today, it's best known to architects from its unflattering rhetorical deployment by Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi. They cast it as the Modernist equivalent of The Long Island Duckling, the idea being that in both, tremendous formal and constructional energy has been put into conveying a single message. If the Duck proclaims that you can go there and buy duck meat, they argue, Crawford Manor's abstraction, sculpted massing, protruding balconies, and applique skin of fluted concrete texture all add up to proclaim modern building found here.

In doing so, oddly, they fall back on a Modernist expectation that things should be as they seem - that there's something amiss if the building looks like it's made of Rudolph's cast-in-place "corduroy concrete" when it's actually a steel frame clad with precast panels. One could argue that in fact the cladding is akin to the "decorated shed" which Scott Brown and Venturi were advancing as the preferred counterpart to the "duck." But ultimately the designers are really talking past each other: Rudolph takes for granted that a dynamic, uplifting modern spirit could be expressed through form and construction, while Scott Brown and Venturi reject the impetus to express less lofty notions, like "the door is over here." I find their points provocative, while also finding Rudolph's building to be, well, almost all right.

Taken on: September 20, 2021

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Sets appears in: • ! Rolling Current Backup ! • Jul - Sep 21 more » • Architexts: US Misc Cities • Architecture: Connecticut • Rudolph, Paul • Lofty Discourse « less

Groups appears in: • The Art & Architecture of Paul Rudolph

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