Recent polls indicate that 80 percent of us favor quarantine. Quarantining perceived danger is nothing new, and ....
It always feels safer to be away from threatening people, situations and ideas. Last week, a “Starchitect,” Frank Gehry, gushed an exasperated blurt (and middle-finger gesture) to a room filled with quizzical reporters. He declared that 98 percent of the built world was worthless and he was part of those who are just trying to “do something special” and pleaded for the press to “God, just leave us alone.”
Self-selecting quarantines, like the one Gehry advocates (the urban design version of the middle-finger gesture) reverse the paradigm of the majority shunning the minority.
Sometimes, self-imposed quarantines have nothing to do with Gehry’s type of elitism or protection from perceived danger. Sometimes isolation is needed to facilitate function. Yale-New Haven Hospital naturally becomes a large internally focused neighborhood so it can be efficient and effective in its mission.
But the Big Dog of the New Haven Pound is Yale. While creating a campus is a naturally quarantining evolution, Yale (and almost every other university) has grabbed the opportunity to reinforce functional segregation with aesthetic expression.
With the building of Evans Hall for Yale’s School of Management on Whitney Avenue, designed by Sir Norman Foster, that branding may have reached the gut-level refusal of New Haven’s collective aesthetic tolerance. Some say its interior is magic and perfect, but its visual imposition on its neighborhood quarantines itself.
This visceral response of the community makes the rush to build Yale’s two new residential colleges, as designed by the School of Architecture’s dean, Robert A.M. Stern, all the more meaningful. This one large meandering ensemble of shapes and spaces is a dead-on lift of those “Oxbridge” College Gothic buildings that built out Yale in the first half of the 20th century.
It may or may not be, like most of Yale’s other dormitories, a gated community, but the irony of its self-imposed aesthetic quarantine is obvious.