Paul Rudolph's Temple Street Parking Garage Gets A Tune-Up

Paul Rudolph’s perspective rendering of the Temple Street Parking Garage in New Haven, Connecticut. Rudolph exploits concrete’s capacity as a “plastic” construction material: he uses it to create a structure that bridges the realms of architecture and sculpture, expressing of the flow and movement of modern transportation. © The estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation

THE RUDOLPH LIST

We’re sometimes asked to give a list Paul Rudolph’s most important projects, and that’s always a challenge. Over a half-century career, Rudolph worked on almost every type of building and interior (and at all budget levels.)—and he had well over 300 commissions (and got a large number of them built), and worked in every part of the country and internationally. So with an output like Rudolph’s, if one is forced to to make a concise list (like for a short encyclopedia article or an “elevator speech”), then where do you begin?—or rather: Where does one stop?

Rudolph admirers and scholars each have their favorites, and it’s enjoyable to debate what would go in a list of the “top 10”. The Yale Art & Architecture Building (rededicated as Rudolph Hall) is usually Number 1 on such a lists—but what others would be included? Everyone has their preferences, and Rudolph’s own Quadruplex Penthouse, the Milam Residence, the Walker Guest House, the Tuskegee Chapel, the Orange County Government Center, UMass Dartmouth, Endo Labs, and Burroughs Wellcome would be top contenders.

TEMPLE STREET PARKING GARAGE

A strong candidate would be Rudolph’s Temple Street Parking Garage—a large parking structure in New Haven, Connecticut, which he was commissioned to design in the late 50’s, and which opened in 1963.

The Temple Street Parking Garage in New Haven. Long after the garage was built, an access bridge was added (seen at far left), connecting the garage’s 2nd level to a building across the street. Note the curved entry ramp at the lower-right corner: Rudolph’s construction drawing for it is shown below. Photo by Gunnar Klack, courtesy of Wikipedia

FUNCTIONAL SCULPTURE IN CONCRETE

The “plastic” and sculptural potential of concrete had long been recognized by architects, and Frank Lloyd Wright—who was always speaking about "the nature of materials”—was emphatic about it: “I should say that in this plasticity of concrete lies its aesthetic value.”

Previous to the Temple Street Garage, designers had used concrete in a sculpted or curvilinear ways. But in America, Rudolph’s expressive use of curved concrete, and on this scale—700 feet long, occupying two city blocks, and accommodating 1,500 cars!—made this building into an architectural icon.

Rudolph was explicit that his inspiration came from the building’s essential purpose—it’s connection to motorized transportation:

"The parking garage is a peculiar twentieth-century phenomenon. The one in New Haven comes from the design of throughways. Most parking garages are merely skeletal structures which didn't get any walls. They are just office building structures with the glass left out. I wanted to make a building which said it dealt with cars and movement. I wanted there to be no doubt that this is a parking garage."

A portion of one sheet from Paul Rudolph’s set of construction drawings for the Temple Street Parking Garage. Here shown is the layout of the the entry ramps (which can be seen in the lower-right portion of the above photo.) © The estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation

It’s a pleasure to contemplate curvatures—and there’s evidence that this is built-into human brain structures. How much more powerful the effect can be when the scale of the curvatures is grand (and one can actually move along them), as in this structure. One can even sense that delight while looking at the flowing lines of Rudolph’s construction drawings for this project (as in the example above.)

Paul Rudolph, at the construction site of his Temple Street Parking Garage in New Haven—a concerto of curves. Photograph by Judith York Newman.

Concrete: Case Studies In Conservation Practice (in the Conserving Modern Heritage series of the The Getty Conservation Institute) offers useful information (and the research which led to it) on the repair of concrete architecture. This is done via case studies of some of the most famous buildings of the Modern era.

CONCRETE EXAMPLES OF sUCCESSFUL RESTORATION

Like human bodies, buildings need ongoing care—especially as they age. Architecture with exposed concrete surfaces has its own challenges—and this has been the focus of research, especially in recent decades as mid-20th century Modern Movement buildings have passed their half-century mark—and shown signs of their maturity.

Successful case studies of the renovations of important Modern buildings (and the research which backs them up) are shown in Concrete: Case Studies In Conservation Practice (an informative book in the Conserving Modern Heritage series of the The Getty Conservation Institute), which we wrote about. The examples they chose are stellar, including: Unité d’habitation by Le Corbusier; Brion Cemetery by Carlo Scarpa, and the Morse and Ezra Stiles Colleges at Yale by Eero Saarinen.

Their point is that architecture with exposed concrete, which may have become unsightly (or have even developed more serious problems), can be made made attractive again and repaired—and this is thoroughly demonstrated in their case studies.

TUNING-UP THE GARAGE

The Temple Street Parking Garage is part of the New Haven Parking Authority’s set of parking facilities, which supplies the city with over 8,000 parking spaces—and Temple Street provides a hefty portion of that: nearly 20%. It opened over 50 years ago, and—as one can imagine—a garage gets “hard usage”. So it’s had a variety of repairs and renovation work done over the years—as in this work, done by National Restoration Systems, a firm whose specialties include the restoration of parking structures.

Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation board member Tim Hayduk was in New Haven, and here are some shots he shared with us. The photos show that the Temple Street Parking Garage is in need of some care:

Exterior [street] view of the Temple Street Garage, showing an area in need of repair. Photo by Tim Hayduk.

And is beginning to get it:

Photo by Tim Hayduk

Scaffolding for renovation work at the garage’s roof. Photo by Tim Hayduk

Of particular interest are the light poles, which Rudolph designed for the garage’s roof—they are particularly sculptural elements. Below is an older photo showing two of them, seen just above the line of the garage’s top level. Like the body the building, the lights are also made of concrete—and the use of a matching material (as well as curvilinear forms) makes them seem to grow out of the structure.

The concrete light poles, at the top of the Temple Street Parking Garage. Part of the urban context is the classical tower seen in the background: is the one drawn by Rudolph at the left edge of his original perspective rendering (shown at the top of this article): it is the corner tower of a nearby residential building, the Temple Square Apartments. Photo courtesy of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Library

Curvilnear concrete light poles, on the roof of the Temple Street Parking Garage. Photo by Tim Hayduk.

Given mid-20th century concrete construction technology, the only way to build such relatively slender, curved concrete elements was to pack their cores with steel reinforcing. The amount of steel needed would not leave much distance between the face of the reinforcing bars and the pole’s exterior surfaces (the “cover thickness”)—with consequences for the thickness of the concrete material separating the steel from the exterior elements.

Over the decades, water probably penetrated to the steel, resulting in the need to renovate some of these light poles. In the below close-up view, one can see that the concrete has been removed from a pole, exposing the reinforcing bars that had been beneath the concrete:

One of the garage’s rooftop light poles, with the concrete removed (exposing the steel reinforcing bars). The pole’s actual “head” (containing the lighting elements) is an oval-shaped metal and glass enclosure (seen at the left), which nestled in the pole’s curved tip. Photo by Tim Hayduk

We hope that the authorities will give the Temple Street Parking Garage—which is one of the city’s resources (and a significant quantity of “embodied energy”)—continuing careful maintenance and repair, and that all renovations will respect the integrity of Paul Rudolph’s design.

A pair of the Temple Street Parking Garage’s light poles, designed by Paul Rudolph. Photo by Tim Hayduk