the class – about two-thirds American and one-third British – and we would be there day and night. It was an architectural boot camp; students did not so much fail as physically collapse.
Rudolph’s early work in and around Sarasota, Florida, had drawn me to Yale. These delicate lightweight houses and school buildings, inspired by his experience as a naval architect during the war, used materials minimally and made the most of natural lighting and ventilation. Rudolph taught us for the first semester. He had a brilliant analytical mind, and influenced all of us, Norman Foster in particular. He also kept late hours; he was busy designing his brutalist masterpiece, the Yale Art and Architecture Building, at the same time as teaching. He drove himself every bit as hard as he drove us.
Louis Kahn’s Richards Medical Research Laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
The laboratories are the clearest expression of Khan’s distinction between ‘served’ and ‘servant’ spaces. The three laboratory towers have open, unobstructed floors and windows to let in natural light. They are grouped round a central service core housing air intakes and elevators. Each laboratory tower is also supported by air extractors and stairways, contained in external shafts.
It was an introduction to the different pace of American life. People took pride in not having holidays or stopping for lunch, in contrast to Europe, where everything used to shut for several hours at lunchtime (Renzo Piano told me plainly when we first met, ‘I don’t talk work when I’m eating.’), and for the whole of August.
It was also a complete contrast to the theoretical ambience of the AA. There was little time for that in Rudolph’s world; it was all about production, and about appearance. On one occasion we were discussing cars, and I was debating how they could safely share streets with pedestrians. Rudolph felt I was missing the point; he was more interested in how the cars looked, and the composition their different colours would create when viewed from above. The contrast between the English and American approaches found expression in friendly rivalry between the students too. The Americans put up a banner saying ‘Do More’; the English contingent responded with one saying ‘Think More’.
Yale opened the door to new influences, both inside and outside the hothouse atmosphere of the Arts Building, temporary home of the architecture school. This concrete and brick building, with services integrated into its honeycombed ceiling, was one of Louis Kahn’s earliest commissions. It had a confidence and weight to its concrete floorplates, its handling of geometry and order, and its elegant central staircase.
We went to see Kahn himself lecture in Pennsylvania, where he had moved a few years before. Kahn’s poetic sensibility set him apart from the previous generation. He was the first great post-war architect, and a huge influence on Norman Foster and me, an inspirational lecturer and a great teacher. He talked poetically of the nature of materials and the respect that architects owed them, of the relationship between architecture and music, of space and silence, of asking a brick what it wanted to be in a building. His intellectual analysis of the distinction between served spaces, the functional rooms and spaces of buildings, and servant spaces, the spaces and rooms that support them (staircases, toilets, ventilation ducts and so on) made a deep impression on me. His best-known buildings came later, and at their best – the Richards Medical Research Laboratories in Philadelphia, for example, and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California – they were stunning.
James Stirling also came to lecture at Yale, and became a close friend. Jim was the bright hope of British modernist architecture and the first to emerge from under the shadow of giants like Aalto, Mies and Corb. We had good architects, but we’d never managed to develop a distinct architectural movement. Working with James Gowan, Jim devised a modernist British vernacular, combining standardised industrial materials – red brick, standard window sections, industrial glazing – structural inventiveness, and a sense of architectural rhythm and lightness that brought life to the façades of his buildings.
The Engineering Building at Leicester University, designed by James Gowan and James Stirling, felt like a new beginning, the emergence of an English vernacular form of modernism.
Stirling and Gowan’s designs for Leicester University’s Department of Engineering felt like an explosion of new language. The department had a legible ‘engineered’ structure – you could read what the elements did in supporting the building – but also had a sculptural, almost constructivist aspect to its plant and façade. It was expressive and eclectic, but also clearly modern. Sadly, after he split with Gowan, Jim’s buildings lost their lightness of touch and their humour, but he was a huge influence on all of us at the time, as well as a hugely exciting, big presence when I was at Yale. Jim attached himself to our little gang of British students; Norman, Eldred Evans (who was the most talented of us all) and I visited New York with him, enjoying architecture and cocktails at the Four Seasons. (Jim thought he had escaped notice while slipping their elegant ashtrays into his pocket, only to discover them appearing on his bill when we left.) We shared an apartment for a period, hosting the most riotous parties, with plates thrown out of the window to save on washing up, and regular visits by the police.
Gowan (left) and Stirling in front of the building in 1963.
For my second semester at Yale, Serge Chermayeff, who was a professor at Harvard, took over from Paul Rudolph. Chermayeff had escaped from Russia to England in the 1920s, where he worked with Erich Mendelsohn on projects such as the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea and the Hamlyn House in Chelsea, but moved to the United States in 1940. He took a more intellectual and European view of architecture than Rudolph in books like Community and Privacy, looking at the balance between the public and private realms, and at how distinctions and transitions between them could be preserved in a modern world that seemed intent on blurring them. Chermayeff was a great teacher and an intellectual force and he dominated us completely. I remember thinking that if he had opened a window and told us we could fly, we would have leapt out.
But of all these teachers, Vincent Scully made the deepest impression. His lectures drew students and architects from miles around, and regularly received standing ovations. He would hurl himself round the stage when he was lecturing, once becoming so animated that he fell off and broke his arm. His breadth of knowledge and understanding of the history of art and architecture, particularly of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn, was complemented by a deep civic sense of the relationship between buildings, people and places (he recommended we read Paul Ritter’s Planning for Man and Motor, one of the first books to consider seriously the impact of cars on cities).
Norman Foster’s and my student project design for Yale Science Buildings. Heavily influenced by Louis Kahn, our scheme included a central spine of car parking, service towers and lecture theatres along the ridge of the hilly site with laboratories spilling downhill either side.
Vince’s lectures opened up new ways of seeing and experiencing buildings, and in particular helped me to understand Frank Lloyd Wright and his ordering of internal and external space. Wright had a profound influence on me. Norman, Eldred, our brilliant fellow student Carl Abbott and I visited every Wright building we could.
Norman Foster, me and Carl Abbott, at Yale in 1962.
Su and I went to stay with the sculptor Naum Gabo and his wife Miriam, thanks to the connections of her father Marcus. They lived about an hour from Yale, in Middlebury, and their house