Brutalism in New Haven

New Haven concentrated more ambitious concrete architecture per square mile than almost any American city, thanks to Yale University's patronage and an aggressive urban renewal program in the 1950s and 60s. Paul Rudolph, chair of Yale's architecture department, built the corrugated concrete Art and Architecture Building and the Temple Street Parking Garage, a full city block of sculpted concrete. Eero Saarinen contributed the swooping Ingalls Rink and the stone-and-concrete Ezra Stiles and Morse Colleges, while Gordon Bunshaft's Beinecke Library filters daylight through translucent marble panels into its glass tower of rare books. Marcel Breuer's former Armstrong Rubber headquarters stands beside the highway as another survivor of the renewal era. Smaller civic works, like the New Haven Central Fire Station, show how deeply the concrete idiom penetrated the everyday city.