Changing Plans
Bauer Wurster Hall often gets categorized as a Brutalist style building, but its designers asserted that they were not aspiring to a Brutalist aesthetic. Certainly the building can be read as Brutalist in the sense of béton brut (the French term for raw, rough concrete), but more than anything the designers defined their approach as very much against a celebrated Brutalist building that was dominating the architectural press at the time, Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale University. This idea began with Wurster. He admired Rudolph’s design, but it was an “inturning, finite building,” exactly opposite what he wanted for the CED. Esherick put it more wryly, joking that the Rudolph’s building was so affected that you “couldn’t go to the men’s room without having a spatial experience.”
If the designers aligned themselves in any way with a Brutalist approach it would be in their preoccupation with consistency of form and material. Esherick and Olsen—less so DeMars—stressed a no-nonsense rationalist aesthetic that emphasized repeated modules and standardized space. This tendency emerges clearly in the evolution of building plans from 1959 to 1960. The distinct and irregular forms that appear in the earlier plans transition to the less differentiated and regular configuration recognizable as the building’s final form.
That said, the designers were also responding to matters of program and setting. Both the Architecture department and the Library wanted locations on the north side of the building for the quality of light. The Landscape department favored the northeast corner of site because the adjacent open space could potentially be used for demonstration gardens (the Calvin Laboratory building soon precluded that possibility). The east wing, which would have completed the courtyard enclosure, was reduced to open the building to glade and hills beyond, and a budget squeeze eliminated it altogether.
The placement of the departmental offices, which had long been a point of contention, ultimately ended up on second floor with the Dean’s office central and departmental offices placed nearby. The small stairways between floors two and three were a clever way to keep faculty offices and classrooms close to their departmental offices.
