#376 - Across the Street from Genius: Yale’s A&A and Art Gallery

Summary

Archispeak Episode #376 Summary

"Across the Street from Genius: Yale’s A&A and Art Gallery"

Hosts: Evan Troxel & Cormac Phalen
Date: August 25, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode of Archispeak, Evan and Cormac embark on a richly detailed discussion of two landmark buildings at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut: Paul Rudolph’s Yale Art & Architecture Building (now Rudolph Hall) and Louis Kahn’s Yale University Art Gallery. After introducing their new video series “What Makes This Building Great,” the hosts reflect on their in-person visits to these architectural icons, parsing their impressions of materials, spatial experience, design process, and the relationship between the buildings and their context. The conversation is filled with insight, tactile details, personal anecdotes, and candid questions about how these projects were conceived and built.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Launching a New Video Series: “What Makes This Building Great?”

• YouTube Deep Dives:
  • The hosts introduce their supplemental video content, allowing viewers to see architectural diagrams, photographs, and sketches as they discuss buildings in real time.
  • Evan: “We actually are basically pulling out the trace paper and laying it over the plans, except digitally. And we’re drawing over these things to convey ideas, and we’re drawing over our photographs.” (05:32)
  • Cormac: Emphasizes the value of shared, on-site experiences, and encourages feedback on format and future content.

2. Paul Rudolph’s Yale Art & Architecture Building (Yale A&A / Rudolph Hall)

• Context and Timeline:

  • The building was constructed 1958–1964, with the main construction happening remarkably quickly—just two years. (07:48)
  • Notable for its monumental scale, all-custom details, and raw, textured concrete.

• Materiality and Brutalism:

  • Evan: “It’s not pleasant to hug this building...but because of that…shadow play, shadow play, shadow play.” (09:08–09:59)
  • Cormac: Notes the unique detailing—custom handrails, rough concrete, and varied shadow effects, highlighting the interplay of surface, light, and mass.
  • The tactile roughness of the exposed aggregate creates a constantly changing facade as light moves during the day.

• Spatial Experience and Entry Sequence:

  • The building features a dramatic, monumental exterior stair and numerous planes and voids that create a complex entry procession.
  • Cormac: “There is no two minutes in the day that are the same, right?” (10:27)
  • The stair forms appear as floating planes but are all cast-in-place concrete, underscoring the craftsmanship and complexity of the formwork. (12:32)

• Brutalist Icon:

  • The building is recognized not just within Brutalism, but as a defining work of the movement.
  • Evan: “It not only falls [in]...it is 100% [Brutalist]...this is why you can fall in love with a brutalist project.” (13:49)

• Dialogue With Surroundings and Process:

  • The hosts discuss how Rudolph’s design engaged with both traditional and modern campus neighbors, sometimes in harmony, sometimes defiantly modern.
  • Cormac: Observes the “equal balance of a very vertical building and a very horizontal building,” achieved via compositional lines and contrasts. (15:13)
  • Study models and spatial iteration were likely crucial to the original design process, given its complex massing and form.

• Memorable Quote:

  • Evan: “It reminds me of like, Ray Kappe’s style, except different material. It’s planes and volumes in this mixture of void and solid and punctures and planes and like, the way that things kind of pass through each other. And it’s great.” (10:56)

• Entry Procession:

  • The exterior stair is intentionally inefficient and asymmetrical, forcing users to make decisions—left or right—creating a heightened sense of arrival.
  • Cormac: “He’s not making the decisions for you… It’s like slot canyons in Zion… where things have been chipped away over time.” (24:56–25:14)

• Inspiration and Experience:

  • The hosts speculate on the inspiration, suggesting a subtractive approach reminiscent of natural canyons.
  • Unfortunately, they were unable to access the building’s interior due to locked doors, but share observations from extensive exterior exploration.

Notable Segment:

• Entry Sequence & Shadow Play
  • “It’s not the most efficient…he’s not making the decisions for you, he’s giving you options. And I wonder what the inspiration for this, the way that this kind of got articulated is. Because to me, like, in my personal experience, this is like slot canyons in Zion...” — Evan, (24:23–25:14)

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3. Louis Kahn’s Yale University Art Gallery

• Context and Timeline:

  • Built 1951–1953, predating the British Art Center and the A&A Building.
  • Collaboration between Kahn and architect Anne Tyng.
  • The Gallery sits in an ensemble of historic and modern campus buildings, and its understated exterior conceals an inventive, geometric interior. (29:05–30:47)

• Spatial Organization and Entry:

  • The entry is on a corner, similar to but predating the British Art Center.
  • Once inside, visitors encounter a striking, free-standing cylindrical stairwell—an iconic space-defining gesture.

• Geometric Rigour and Triangular Motifs:

  • The building is renowned for its ceiling—a triangular coffered slab—and the staircase, which forms a triangular path inscribed within a cylinder.
  • Cormac: “That was somewhat the motif, obviously, of that geometric expression was the triangle. You had it in the coffered ceilings, you had it in the intersection of the roof of the cylinder, the stairs within the cylinder…” (34:25)

• Material Contrasts:

  • Materials are expressed honestly and inventively: dark stone stair treads, vertical thin board-form concrete, honed brick, terrazzo floors, and light stainless steel rails.
  • Evan: “There’s four or five, and the stainless steel rails. There’s five different materials here. And they’re all super tasteful, super high performing as far as maintenance goes, right?” (44:54)

• Wayfinding and Visual Clarity:

  • Kahn’s “servant and served” philosophy organizes circulation and galleries elegantly—wayfinding is mostly intuitive, achieved through spatial moves rather than signage.
  • Cormac: “It doesn’t need signs to tell you where to go. The simple massing, the simple moves…emphasizes visual order so eloquently, elegantly, not eloquently. It’s both.” (43:12)

• Ceilings and Mechanical Integration:

  • The coffered ceiling is a tour de force, providing space for mechanical systems while shaping the spatial experience.
  • An extruded metal grate ceiling is used in service areas—functional, accessible, and quietly industrial.

• Memorable Quotes:

  • Evan: “It’s the same DNA. It’s like a different expression of the same DNA. It’s really cool.” (36:12)
  • Evan: “It’s hard to explain this stuff on an audio podcast, but we’re doing a pretty good job.” (37:10)

• Visitor Experience and Vertigo:

  • Cormac: Shares his own discomfort with the openness of the stair, the visual continuity from the top to the bottom, and the unusual distance to the rail. (38:13–40:35)

• Signage and Details:

  • Minimalist signage—just a small number designation at the midpoint of brick stair landings; little visual clutter, mostly relying on material cues.

• Functional Aesthetic:

  • Heating systems are robust yet elegant, wrapped in wire mesh and serving as window benches—a clever, multipurpose solution.
  • Evan: “You turned it into a bench, basically.” (50:19)

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4. Comparing Rudolph and Kahn: Evolution and Restraint

• Urban Context:
  • Both buildings exist in dialog with one another and with the campus; modernism is expressed distinctly—Rudolph in aggressive, brutalist concrete masses, Kahn in geometric clarity and restrained materials.
• Architectural Maturity:
  • Cormac: Suggests Kahn’s increasing restraint and distillation over time. “He almost discovered restraint, in my opinion, in a way that you can see and say Exeter, because here’s the time frame of…British Arts, Exeter and Salk.” (51:14–53:53)
• Integration of Systems:
  • Both hosts praise the integration of structure, systems, and skin—“how well packaged everything is.” (54:26)
  • Modern project constraints and the push for speed compromise such holistic design today.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Brutalism:
  • (13:49) Evan: “It is…defining…Brutalist…this is why you can fall in love with a brutalist project.”
• On Entry Sequence:
  • (24:56) Evan: “He’s not making the decisions for you. He’s giving you options.”
• On Contextual Relationships:
  • (19:21–21:13) Cormac: “You think about…such an interesting collection of modern and classical architecture all kind of coming together…some pay homage…some…the architecture building…rules be damned.”
• On Kahn’s Art Gallery Geometry:
  • (34:25) Cormac: “The motif…was the triangle…you had it in the coffered ceilings…in the intersection of the roof of the cylinder, the stairs within the cylinder…”
• On Timeless Detailing:
  • (44:54) Evan: “There’s five different materials here. And they’re all super tasteful, super high performing as far as maintenance goes, right? Like, this is all heavy duty stuff and none of it’s painted…”

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:10–07:03 – Introduction & Explanation of “What Makes This Building Great” Video Series
• 07:14–17:44 – Yale A&A Building (Rudolph Hall): Timeline, Construction, Materiality, Spatial Experience
• 17:44–26:26 – Entry Procession, Formwork, Inspirations & Subtractive Design, Relationship to Context
• 29:05–38:13 – Kahn’s Yale Art Gallery: Timeline, Geometry, Interior Spatial Organization
• 38:13–44:54 – Stair Experience, Wayfinding, Material Contrasts, Minimalist Signage
• 46:17–50:06 – Ceilings, Mechanical Integration, Functional Details (Fin Tubes as Benches)
• 51:14–54:28 – Comparing Buildings, Evolution of Architectural Restraint, Integration of Systems

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Final Thoughts

The hosts leave listeners with a sense of awe for these canonical works, highlighting how material, craft, and spatial innovation converge to create great architecture. Both buildings stand as powerful reminders of a time when architects could pursue design excellence through thoughtful consideration, iteration, and integration—a lesson for today’s often hurried practice.

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For those longing for visuals or deeper dives, check out the Archispeak YouTube channel for the video companion to this episode.

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Episode main theme:
A candid, on-the-ground architectural critique of two seminal Yale buildings, revealing what makes them endure as “across the street from genius.”

Transcript

[A]

All right, so we're talking about two more buildings on our trip. Let's go across the street from the last building. Oh, and let's. Let's take a moment to talk about what we did, because the people who are listening to the audio version, maybe they. Maybe they figured it out, but maybe they don't know is we did a new thing on the YouTubes. You want to explain what we did?

[B]

The YouTubes or the twos? You. Yes, yes. So what did we do? So we did a little deep dive dissection of the.

[A]

Can you really do a little deep dive dissection?

[B]

No.

[A]

And could we do a little deep dive dissection?

[B]

No. As it turns out. As it turns out that once you wind me up, I'm like the little monkey, you know, with the energizer. But, yeah, exactly.

[A]

Keep going, Keep going.

[B]

And yeah, so, no, it wasn't short. So it wasn't short. So what we decided to do, and we've been talking about this for a very long time, is internally. Not internally.

[A]

So, people, if you haven't heard this before, this is new to you. We.

[B]

That guy and I have been talking quite a bit about this opportunity to do something called what makes this building great. We would basically look at buildings. You know, hopefully it was interesting because we talked about it in so many different iterations about whether or not we wanted to just talk about something that we've both been to, but not been to together or in and. Or go to places and then talk about them as part of a shared experience. But it just seemed natural that on this trip, we saw so much architecture, we experienced so much architecture together that this was like the. Oh, yeah, let's do it. Because there's tons of photographs, tons of conversations while we were in the spaces. Tons of just this quiet reverence while we were in the spaces. And it just seemed very. The right time for us to start to unveil this process. And obviously, it would be a process and we will grow into it. And we would love to hear from everybody as they're starting to look at it and see it, whether or not you're like, ooh, you guys could do this, or, ooh, you could do that. Because, you know, that's part of the fun about this podcast is just being able to. Yeah.

[A]

If we can get sponsors and we can get support, we could actually do this. Because here's the rules. We made rules for this. We had to be in the same place at the same time together at the same building, and then we have to Decide if it's worthy of this kind of series of types of episodes. I could foresee us doing more of this in the future, funding allowing. Right. We're on opposite sides of the country. Obviously, there are opportunities for us to come together, you know, once or twice a year for different reasons. And so we could make it a thing. But, yeah, we've been talking about this for a long time and. And so, yeah, we made rules for ourselves, which I just described doesn't. You know, we're architects. We could also decide to break those rules sometimes if it comes up. But that's our design language. That's our party for this. And so, yeah, we have to be at the same place at the same time, same building and experience it together because, yeah, we have conversations there that kind of then work their way into the subconscious and percolate until we have the present, the formal effort episode. And the reason we only do it on YouTube, not on the audio version. So you guys all heard the audio version, which was not the same as the video version, where we're trying to describe what we saw in the audio version.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Whereas in the video version we can actually show it and we actually take it a step beyond. Do you care to elaborate on what that is?

[B]

Sure. We pull out the old crayons and start drawing on the screen and, you know, talk about the different things that we see. And one of the interesting things about this, and you'll see it as it unfolds in this episode, is that even though we were in the space together and even though we were talking about certain things, some things we did talk about, we started to discover more and more as we were even talking about it, as we were filming and creating the episode where as you started to see one thing, you were starting to pick up and see something else and something else. And it's just this. And I'm really glad that this was one of the buildings we chose to start it off with because it was, as we jokingly said, the gift that kept on giving. You kept looking harder, you saw more, you saw more and you saw more. And it was just amazing how it continued to unfold. And even today I was mentioning Devin before the show, I was talking about this a little bit with a co worker and. And I was discovering even more about this building and buildings like the British Arts Museum by Louis Kahn. That was as part of that episode that'll be. That you'll be able to check out, is just one of those buildings that, as you're looking at it and trying to discover what does. What does make this building great. You get to start to see all these layers that just start unfolding. And it's like some people use the analogy of the onion. You just keep peeling it away. And there's more and more and more. And honestly, in this particular case, there was more and more and more every time we turn around. Oh, look at that. Ooh, look at that.

[A]

Yep, totally. Yeah. Yeah. So the Yale center, the Yale Art British Arts Museum, Man. What's the right name of that project? What is it actually called? I just call it the British Art Museum. That's what we did. It's only on YouTube. You can check the link in the. In the audio version of the episode to find. Find it. Or you can head over to the Archa Speak YouTube channel and you can find it there. And so Cormac alluded to the fact that, yeah, we actually are basically pulling out the trace paper and laying it over the plans, except digitally. And we're drawing over these things to convey ideas, and we're drawing over our photographs. And so we've got plans, we've got sections, we've got a site plan, and we basically start and go through the project as we experienced it, as you heard on the podcast, but with diagrams. So it's. It's a little bit more involved for us to create these episodes, obviously. But so we're not planning on trying to film one of the versions and make it work for both YouTube and audio. I don't think that works. So for these buildings that we're talking about, we're really doing them separately as an audio podcast and then as a video podcast. So what we would love it if you would do is subscribe to our YouTube channel so that you get notified when these new episodes come out. And we would love to see you over there, leave a comment and let us know what you think about that kind of content that we're making as an extension of what we're doing here at Archa Speak.

[B]

Yeah. And if there's anything that you guys see said, oh, you know, you guys could also maybe do this or do that, let us know.

[A]

Throw it over. Throw it over the fence.

[B]

We're here to grow.

[A]

Yep. All right, so in this episode, we're going to build on our last one where we talked about the British Art Museum, we're going to walk across the street in New Haven, Connecticut, a couple and a couple times. And the first building that I think we want to talk about today because it's probably the lightest touch we Only got to just kind of walk around the corner that's kind of exposed to this building. And that is Paul Rudolph's building. And the official name of this building is the art and architecture building for Yale University. And it was designed and built, let's see, the project dates are 1958 to 1964.

[B]

4.

[A]

But I think it was only a couple years of construction. So there's, there's some pre years of kind of programming in the school, figuring out what they were going to do and purchasing land. I think there was a gas station on the corner before this building, for example. And then they, they had to procure all that stuff and then, you know, construction, and then there's some, some other stuff, you know, some modifications during the design, shall we say, and then it doesn't happen. And then they built it two years. And I think that two years is pretty incredibly quick for a building like this to get constructed.

[B]

When you had mentioned two years, I kind of was a little gobsmacked because looking at the scale, looking at the monumentality, looking at the can it, there is no like off the shelf details. No, of course, you know, it is incredibly unique. I'm even looking at photographs of handrails on the exterior. And these aren't just your standard, hey, let's go get a pipe rail and slap it on the treads. This is all, every little bit of this is fully articulated, fully designed, fully. Nothing. Nothing is off the shelf.

[A]

No, no. And it's a six story building. I mean it's exactly, it's not a little thing.

[B]

And it's a lot of concrete.

[A]

Yeah, it is. And it's a lot, it's meaty concrete. I mean, exposed aggregate. I mean, so yeah, we can't show pictures on an audio podcast, but man, the texture, we kind of talked about it a couple episodes ago when we just kind of breezed through it. But man, like, it's not pleasant to hug this building. How would I know?

[B]

How would you know? Because you did. When we, you know, get to the video version of this one, if we get to the video version or even if we breeze through the video version of this, there's photos we could share. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

There's evidence, there's. Yeah. So it's rough, It's a rough building. It's got a rough texture for sure. And I mean it, it's. But because of that, I mean. And this plays back into the Cormac Phelan saying of the trip. Shadow play, shadow play, shadow play.

[B]

I'm looking at the photo that I took of you caressing the building and the shadow play on the exterior. There is not one consistent surface. It just. It's dancing across the. The light, the shadow, the. In the reveals, everything else, I mean, it's just. It's dancing across this facade, and it. There is no two minutes in the day that are the same, Right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And it's just so amazing. There's, you know, you get the big, hard shadows that fill in the courtyards or the stairs to the entry or things like that, but then you get, like, just the dancing of the light around. Just on the texture. Exactly on the texture.

[A]

The light happily touches this building.

[B]

Oh, yeah, Yeah. I mean, this is just one of those things. It's like, I got plenty to do here.

[A]

So it reminds me of, like, Ray Cappy style, except different material. Right. It's like. It's planes and volumes in this mixture of void and solid and punctures and planes and like, the way that things kind of pass through each other. And it's great. I haven't studied this building ever. And I know you've met the man. You've met Paul Rudolph. Right. So have you ever looked deeper into this project to kind of understand it?

[B]

So this one. No. I mean, I've seen it a couple of times when I've been through New Haven, but never really stopped to at least the extent of like you and I did, where we were at least able to walk around the exterior. Full disclosure for everyone. The reason why we didn't get a chance to go on site. This was at the end of their school year. People were wrapping up. There was probably nobody really there anymore. The doors were locked. The doors were locked. And, yeah, we tried. We rattled. We rattled. How do we know that? I think. I think, you know, here in a couple of other buildings, in some other universities that we visited. Yeah. We tried every door that we could find. Yeah, yeah. Yep.

[A]

Yeah. But wow, like, such a cool entry procession. You know, obviously these amazing stairs that are. This kind of plays into what we saw in the Kahn building with those reveals.

[B]

Right?

[A]

Yeah, there's a lot of reveals going on here, too. A lot of things that are separating plane, like horizontal planes from vertical planes. I'm just looking at a picture of the stairs that are this monumental stair that leads up, but they appear to be thin planes that are floating and stacked above each other.

[B]

Right.

[A]

I mean, but it's all one big pour, I assume. Right. So maybe not one big pour, but it's. It's all the same material. They didn't pour every tread separately. They're not prefabricated. This is all cast in place stuff. And so it's really amazing what can be accomplished with thoughtful formwork. And I could only imagine that's the contractor's job in this. Right. It's not. It's not like you. I mean, that's one of the interesting things about designing a project like this is you don't design the formwork. When you design the building, you design the building that shows up. That is the. The product of the formwork. And so I think that's such an interesting way to look at this building is to know how much form work is involved and therefore waste. But an incredible level of craftsmanship. We kind of alluded to that as well in the British Art Museum with the incredible craftsmanship of the formwork to get the concrete to the point that they got it to.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Very similar here. But this is before that. Before that particular project. And it's. It's really beautiful how they pulled that off. And. And I. When it comes to. I. I assume this building kind of falls into the brutalist category. Would you.

[B]

Oh, it not only falls. It is 100%.

[A]

It defines it. Yeah. So it's one of those projects where, I mean, the. This is why you can fall in love with a brutalist project. You know, there's. I think brutalism is rather polarizing. So I'm sure there's a lot of people who don't like this building. They probably don't like that texture. They probably think it's kind of abrasive and, you know, harsh. But I think that when I look, especially on a nice sunny day, like we got to visit it on. It's like when we talked about the Geisel Library, right. It's like, you know, the. The Pereira building on the San Diego campus. It's like it pretty. Does depend on the weather when you go visit it. Kind of the. The feeling you're going to get from a material like raw concrete when the whole project is that. And there's various textures of concrete on this project, and there's some, like, visible water staining and things like that, that it just adds character to the building. But it's. It didn't hurt that we went on a nice sunny day because I thought that it was pretty warm and inviting. And maybe that's just the weird architect in me.

[B]

Well, you know, one of the things that. In this would just kind of take this a little bit further. You're talking about the textures and the assembly of all of the different materials and stuff. And so when you're really looking at the assembly of all those different materials, one of the things that I do kind of like find very interesting. This is an interestingly equal balance of a very vertical building and a very horizontal building.

[A]

Because more vertical than horizontal.

[B]

More vertical than horizontal. When you look at it, when you look at it in massing, but when you really look at it, follow all the lines, the horizontal lines through, they line up perfectly. You have this change in texture from the rough texture to this smooth texture that kind of like infills between windows. And you know, you just see these lines continuing on all the way around. And so if you looked at it in one view, you're definitely going to see, if you look at it in massing, you're definitely going to see an extremely vertical building. But then if you look at it in texture, you're going to see, in my own personal opinion, you're seeing a lot of the horizontality because of the way that the control joints and the banding of the windows and the banding of the, the floor edges, the slab edges as it was pulling through and stuff. And it's just, it creates an interesting, this dynamic between vertical and horizontal because it literally, I mean, the first thing you see is, damn, that's tall.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And it's not that big of a building, but it feels tall.

[A]

It's pretty big. It's 117,000 square feet. Six floors. I mean, over six floors.

[B]

Six floors only. I was going to say, what's interesting

[A]

to me is this isn't a curtain wall building.

[B]

Right.

[A]

There's the glass is secondary to the concrete and it's only where it needs to be. And so like when you visited some of Mies's projects in Chicago, when you talked about that trip year wise, where were we with those? Do you remember?

[B]

They actually were either a little bit before this or right around the same time.

[A]

So when MIS is like Rudolph zagging. Right. So what's, what's interesting here is, is this is like the structure is on the outside of the building. The verticality of this building is holding the building up. And they're not trying to hide it behind glass or tuck it behind glass or give it the kind of this curtain wall glass shiny building. This building is very much about expressing this concrete and this playfulness, I guess, of the horizontal and the vertical and the planes and the intersections and the volumes. And it's a really interesting, intricate study carried out with a, with concrete. I mean, it's that Just seems super complicated to me, kind of thinking through the whole going back to that formwork idea.

[B]

If you look. And this is where, you know, it may be a stretch. And so people who are probably listening are like, yeah, right, nice try. But if you look at it and you look at the overlapping shapes, you look at the interlocking shapes, you know, I see a lot of roots in traditional Japanese architecture, you know, because you. You have that interesting way of joining things where you're interlocking. It's almost like Lincoln Logs, you know, where you're kind of interlocking things, but then they.

[A]

Things are kind of lapping on top of each other and.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Yeah. The horizontals especially are coming in in different places. And that's what takes me back to the Ray Cappy feel of this is just this overlap that you're talking about between not different materials, but different masters of the building.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. You know, because. Because there's. There's. You look at these, and you've got, like, these expressions at the top, but they kind of pull through, and there's like, these voids that they pass under. But then you've got these overlapping and interlocking massings that kind of create voids, create openings, create this shift in the material, as you said, kind of create this opportunity to have one material look like it shouldn't be supporting another material. But it is. It's just. It's an interesting. I mean, this is an extremely dynamic corner of an intersection between two streets. And I was trying to zoom in to see York street and.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Something. I'm sure somebody will let me know what that is. But Chapel.

[A]

York and Chapel.

[B]

So York and Chapel. So there is a Chapel.

[A]

Movies. I did the zoom and enhance. That's what I just did.

[B]

Look at you. Yeah, mine. My photos were kind of slightly oblique, so it cut off the chapel part. I could see it was a C, you mean. So it's. You think about. For me, one of the things that I was thinking about when we're standing on this intersection in this corner is you got such an interesting collection of modern and classical architecture all kind of coming together. You've got. We'll talk about it in a little bit. You've got the Yale Arts. Yale University Art Museum by Louis Kahn. And right across. Immediately across the street from that is the Rudolph Building. And then immediately across the street from that is that chapel. And then right next to that is the. The British Arts. But immediately across the street from British Arts is the Yale University Museum. And. But the way that they all come together and create this interesting dynamic. We looked at in the video episode of the British Arts, the sketches that kind of showed the language between this traditional architecture and all of this modern architecture. And how some pay homage to the traditional architecture and some, the architecture building complete, not only pay homage to it, but it's not as apparent and not as clear as what, say, Kahn did. It still has this solidity. It's got this kind of interesting massing, but in a completely just like, you know, rules be damned kind of fashion. Right.

[A]

Can we talk about, like, or hypothesize, how do you think the design process worked on a person project like this? Back then?

[B]

It would be, oh, my Lord, study models.

[A]

Like, lots and lots and lots of study models. Because this is like a Sol A, if you're thinking nowadays, 3D modeling. This is a solid modeling project full of Boolean operations. Right. It's like push and pull, right? This is like. This is splitting faces, pushing and pulling to get these really interesting overlap. And then you know that you would get shot down because, you know that's too expensive. And you can't do that with concrete and all these things. And then you look at this building from 1960, basically, and it's all there. And I'm just wondering, like, how did they design this? And obviously, you know, architects can think spatially. And I think we've probably done at least versions of projects like this, at least in school studio, and those never became real. Right. So when you look at this, and I mean, this is. It's pretty incredible to just see the articulation of the. Again, like solid concrete cast in place concrete. And just thinking through the sequencing of the formwork and the different textures that had to be reversed in the formwork board form, this super rough, kind of corrugated, exposed aggregate look, you've got some horizontal board form, you've got some smooth, you've got horizontal reveals. Again, all this stuff, you have to build a negative version of it in the formwork to produce this. And it's just. Those are like layer three and four of articulation. Layers one and two here are still. They're bigger moves, but they're incredible. And that they actually did that is just absolutely incredible that they were able to pull it off.

[B]

And look at.

[A]

And we didn't even get to go inside people.

[B]

We didn't even get to go inside. And I want to go back to. So I'm looking at an image of the entry stairs into what I'm assuming is the main entrance.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And it's such a asymmetrical sequence.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Of going up the stairs, where you just think you'd go up this grand set of stairs, kind of unobstructed, but there's kind of like this zigzag between masses and stuff where, you know, you see the stairs go past this, you

[A]

know, there's these massive monolithic plain columns that come down and hit the stair in a couple different spots. Yeah.

[B]

They kind of divert this way. You've got.

[A]

You divert your circulation from this side to that side and.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Oh, man.

[B]

And what was. What's interesting about that is it makes what would typically be kind of like a mundane pathway. You know, Very interesting. Very. Kind of like you're. You're now very conscious of the stairs instead of it just saying, oh, it's just a set of stairs that, you know, we walk.

[A]

It's not the most efficient.

[B]

Right. It is.

[A]

It's. It's nothing. You on a journey. Yeah, but you're very complicated journey, but it's still a journey.

[B]

But you're very aware of that sequence to get into the building. Because now here you are, you're forced to make decisions on what would normally be just. I'm holding onto that center handrail from the street to the first landing. And then now you have a decision to make. Do I go left and squeeze between the column and the, you know, narrow

[A]

version or the wide version?

[B]

Or the wide version. And it's just like these interesting kind of like decision making.

[A]

And.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

He's not making the decisions for you. He's giving you options. And I wonder what the inspiration for this, the way that this kind of got articulated is. Because to me, like, in my personal experience, this is like slot canyons in Zion or Grand Canyon, like Utah desert, where things have been chipped away over time.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Obviously it's designed this way like it didn't happen over time, but you get to have these experiences because water did all this work or glaciers did all this work for you to reveal this thing underneath. And that's kind of how it feels here. It's like this narrowing as you're approaching the entry to the building. Like it literally has been removed from the solid mass. This is a very kind of subtractive feeling building. And I. I just wonder what the inspiration there was. I'm sure it's written it. It makes me want to go kind of explore and figure out more, but. But yet it's really interesting way to do. It doesn't feel like the mass is additive. It feels very subtractive yeah, yeah.

[B]

It, I think you kind of hit is just those slot canyons where they were solid and then just through time they eroded. And you're looking at these in the way that they asymmetrically are eroded in all these different masses. There is nothing that's in fact actually one of the columns that you have to make that decision of going around is the, the fire department connection. But you don't see it because it's so kind of like nicely kind of like blended away.

[A]

Right.

[B]

I will say something if like it is that I'm zooming in because you suggested that there's this ability to like zoom into photographs on computers.

[A]

Yeah, I know.

[B]

Right. And so apparently their gallery within that building was open from 9am to 5pm on weekdays, which we were there. We apparently just didn't read that sign.

[A]

Bummer.

[B]

Man.

[A]

Man. Well, one of the things that you talked about when we were there that I thought was cool because you know we're really just staring at the corner of the building for 30 minutes was the way that, you know. And it wasn't at night so it's a little, little tricky to see this. But they have these surface mounted can light fixtures on the ceilings of the multiple floors. And you can see through the glass where those are. I mean like I said, wasn't night. So the lights weren't necessarily on even. They were on in the lobby it looks like. But not in the corner that I'm talking about. But you talked about how they align on each floor. So from the outside when you're reading it, you see that copy paste of floor to floor.

[B]

They didn't have copy paste.

[A]

They didn't have copy paste back then.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So what's interesting though is like there's a picture I have where you can see in the building and there's three rounds surface mounted cans and then on the outside there's three square inset ones into the concrete on, on one around the corner of the building. And it's just kind, it's really interesting to see the customization like the changes in the rules from inside to outside, for example. It's, it's really interesting to see the variety and the variation that happens all around this corner of the building. Very, very interesting.

[B]

Yeah, I'm actually I found that photograph that you and I were talking about on that. And then that, that, that rhythm that it does go up and aligns with the three squares at the top and it's just. Okay, they didn't have copy and paste. They did have, they did have trace.

[A]

They had. Yeah, they had light. Light boards and. And. Yeah, Myar.

[B]

Exactly. See, there you go.

[A]

Layers. Yeah.

[B]

Very cool.

[A]

All right, so I mean, I feel like we've. It's hard to talk more about this building because we didn't get to go in it. But. But right across the street there's another building to talk about, right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What was that building? Was that. Let me go back to my. My photo library here. And so across the street, the Yale Art Museum. The Yale University Art Gallery. Sorry, not museum.

[B]

How dare we?

[A]

And I was looking up this project too. And let's see, this was. This was older than the Rudolph building. Okay, so this is 51 to 53 is the project timeline for this one and 10 years.

[B]

Sorry, you said 50. 53. This is almost 20 years between before the British artist, before the British Art Museum. And so it's kind of interesting to see kind of the expressions, the evolution of the architecture between the two buildings, because there's one that feels very modern in comparison to the one where I would contend, even though it is very modern, still is very rooted in kind of classical architecture. Again, you know, come at me, bro. I will sit down and I will talk through this with anybody who wants to challenge me on this end.

[A]

That's very gentleman of you.

[B]

Yes, gentlemen. But one of the interesting things about this one is just kind of like that. It's a kind of a tale of three different, you know, spaces within the art gallery. There's the Kahn building than if I'm wrong, but the. The building that looks more of a kind of like traditional Gothic, actually. And now that I'm zooming out and looking at it, more of that Gothic building was actually it was. It's new construction or newer construction. Not new to like today, but new to that.

[A]

Oh, I didn't know that.

[B]

No, According to this and this. And so what was very interesting about this one is, you know, this is. This is definitely a collaboration between Liu Kahn and Anting. And she was working with him and actually one of his mistresses or. Sorry to bring up your. Your dirt there, Lou, but, but. And it was so very interesting because she had an affinity for geometric shapes, which of course he did too. And so they collaborated really well together. And to be able to carry this kind of like very geometric kind of idea throughout. And you know, once you go into it. And again, this is kind of very typical to a Louis Kahn building is that the exterior may be very well done, but it's usually typically very understated.

[A]

Yeah. Non descriptive yeah. Looking at the outside, you have no idea what's going on.

[B]

Oh, yeah, no. And. And what's interesting about that is that's his philosophy of what that servant and served philosophy of architecture is that the building itself is there to serve its purpose. The purpose is it's an art gallery, and so the art really should be that. But how do you then use the building to kind of accentuate and elevate, you know, those spaces and stuff? And obviously, in the British art, we were both kind of flabbergasted at that elevation of the space and stuff. And this one had a very different, but also some very similar feels. I felt like this one was very. It was darker. It was cousin, but it was darker. Right, for sure.

[A]

Way darker on purpose.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like. Yes, this. This is way darker. Coffered triangular geometry in the ceiling. Waffle. Ish slab. But a triangular waffle kind of reminded me a little bit of the sheets. Goldstein House by Laudner in that way. Obviously, like, lots of architects have used triangular shapes and waffle slabs before. But what was interesting was the different kind of coffering in the different cells of the triangles. You know, some of them were prisms, some of them were vertical extrusion kind of voids. Some had lights in them, some didn't. But to your point, like, about the geometry. Right, and what makes it similar to the building across the street is so we. He carved away the corner so that you knew where to go into the building, but it was on the corner.

[B]

Right, right.

[A]

This building happened before. That building. You also entered on a corner, but it wasn't carved away. You entered into a space that was then the lobby, kind of pre. Let's just call it, I don't know, pre programming space, where it's like you come in, you shake off the umbrella, you know, you hang up your coat, you check into the gallery, and then you go into the exhibits. And what's interesting is you pretty much get to a very similar thing that you did in the British the vertical circulation. You get to that very quickly. And again, it's a cylinder in a square plan. And it's kind of free from the plan. It's just this separate volume and object. But this time it doesn't stand all on its own, free from the slabs. It's piercing through the slabs. It's a void. And the cylinder walls are. It's continuous on the inside, but on the outside, it's broken by the floors as it passes through them. Very similar, but different. And on this one, instead of having a Square stair scribed inside the circle, the cylinder. We have triangular stairs, right?

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. What was very interesting about. Oh, yeah, and what was very interesting about that is that was somewhat the. The motif, obviously, of that geometric expression was the triangle. You had it in the conference ceilings. You had it in the intersection of the roof of the cylinder, the stairs within the cylinder, even the way that, you know. And I think when we started to take a look at it, and we were up at the very top of the stairs and we were looking down, and you saw the pattern, the scoring pattern in the material, and you could look straight down and you could see that everything comes together in a triangular pie shape to a point in the center of the circle. So, you know, you've got that center point and then it radiating out from that. And so it was very interesting how he holds true to how each of these geometries would interact with each other.

[A]

Yeah. You know, and on this one, the stair is like a black travertine or something. Dark. Very dark.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And it's continuous, so it's not individualized treads that are pulled away from the edges of the concrete. They actually extend beyond the edges of the concrete. So what's interesting is the contrast in stair design. Shape, color, language, rules. It's all very different. But at the same time, you look at it and you're like, oh, it's the same. It's just coming from the same mind. It's coming from, like, this really incredible, rigorous study of these materials. But also, how can we switch it up? There's. It looks to me like there's this constant question of how can we switch it up but still have the same DNA?

[B]

Right.

[A]

It's like a different expression of the same DNA. It's really cool.

[B]

Yeah. And what was interesting about the scoring patterns and how they intersected to that kind of center point, but they also. And I'm looking at a couple of photos where it also hinted at the continuation of the cylinder, but just as. As a floor pattern rather than the actual solid mass within that.

[A]

Right. Yeah. That was really cool. Yeah. So where the opening is punched in to get into the cylinder, you still see the circle scribed on the floor. Because it's like a. It's like a schluter almost. I don't know what the right word for that is. Let's call it that.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

It's like a schluter strip. I got a picture of it. So maybe when we do the video versions, podcast, we'll show that. And then what was interesting Here. Was that the top of this cylinder? I don't have a roof plan, but it looks like it pokes through the roof instead of being held short of the roof like it was at the one across the street. And again, we've got glass block, but in a very different expression here.

[B]

In a clear story kind of version.

[A]

Yeah, it's a clear story with this triangular, like, volumetric. I don't know what's the right way. It's like an extrusion, but a truss. It's like these beams with a solid cap on top that are holding up the cylindrical cap, which is allowing this clear story of glass block. Man, it's hard to explain this stuff on an audio podcast, but we're doing a pretty good job.

[B]

Yeah. And. And. And. And for those of you are just like, man, I want to see this, you know, pull up some photographs. Go see it. Go see it for absolute.

[A]

Sir, go see it for real.

[B]

But also, just wait, there. There will be. How I got a. How if I got a picture of myself. Oh, it's from you. Okay. Like, wait, why don't I get a picture of myself? That's creepy. Okay, so there is one thing that we do need to talk about in both. Both of these and a couple of other spaces. I kept experiencing a very weird vertigo in these stairs.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

And it was just.

[A]

I remember you didn't want to get close to the edge. Yeah.

[B]

And for some reason, it just like, I. There was. You're. Oh, come take a look at this. I'm like, nope, I'm good. I'm good right here.

[A]

So a lot of stairs. Like, a lot of stairs that would get designed today. It's really difficult to get a continuous stair to go all the way. Right. It's expensive. You got to do a lot with the smoke evac or with fire separations and all these things. And so this is before a lot of that, but, yeah, it's a very kind of sculptural stare on the inside of a cylinder. And you can see all the way up, and when you're at the top, you can see all the way down. And I think that kind of is part of that. It's just seeing all of it and knowing that it spirals down, and that kind of just sends your mind into this visual spiral, and that is probably affecting your.

[B]

Affecting your inner ear, you know? And I've got some great photographs. I can't wait till we go through this with the video version of this. But this is another one of those where, you know, as you said, the stairs are held off. And so, you know, you see this, like, gapping between the stairs and that. And that was really sort of where it was, is it was sort of like these stairs that were somewhat floating in the space, you know. And anytime I would get to a landing, I'm like, okay, I'm good here. And it's. Damn it, we gotta keep going up.

[A]

Well, because. So this. Because this is a triangle of stairs. If you're looking at the plan view scribed inside the cylinder, there's more space between the stair and the wall of the cylinder here than there is when it's a square inscribed in the middle of a cylinder, which we saw in the British Museum. So in the British Museum, that gap between the rise and the run, you know, the stair itself and the wall was smaller than it was here. And so here the light really bleeds through beyond the stair to make it feel like this is one continuous space.

[B]

Yeah. And looking at. And zooming into the detached run of treads we're talking about that it's widest is probably like two feet.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the railing is a lot lighter weight here, so you can see through it more. And it feels like, okay, the stairs, heavy. It's connected. It's all one material. It's darker. And then the railing is light and stainless steel, and it's mesh and it's super lightweight.

[B]

Yeah. I'm reaching. I'm reaching for a handrail that would be attached to the wall. And it's actually two feet away from the wall. And it just. It is. I don't know why, though. When I'm looking at the stair, it also feels like, you know, the 80s kind of geometry that you used on, like, album covers, like, say, Duran Duran or something like that, where it's just this weird kind of like, this came

[A]

before that, this came before that. But, yeah, very simple. It's very simple geometry. Yeah, yeah.

[B]

Well, I mean, that's the one thing that we see is like, he's able to use very, very simple geometry to create and to pull off some amazing effect.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. You know, Absolutely.

[B]

And then you pass through these. The galleries, and there's the more traditional Gothic section of it that you go through, and it holds a lot of antiquity, you know, type art. Whereas his, in the gallery portion where he's at, it's a lot more mod. There was some very modern art, then there was also some kind of indigenous art as well. And then you get into the Gothic part of it, and it sets it up for these beautiful kind of like vistas. From when you come inside, you're somewhat oriented. You just walk past the stairs into kind of like this area where you can see long way down to the Gothic portion or into the smaller galleries of the Kahn building. But it's starting to set up these kind of like areas again, very similar to what the British arts is. You come in and you're forced to actually turn. And when you're turned, you're forced to come into the space a little bit more. And then once you come into that space, then it starts to reveal the, the pathways of all of the other directions that you can go at in this. And so it's not forcing it. It doesn't need signs to tell you where to go. The simple massing, the simple moves of, okay, you can't go any further this way because there's a stair in your way. So when you turn this way, you're. You're confronted with the options of going straight ahead to the visitor's desk. And as you're starting to walk that way to your left and your right, it's the opportunity for you to go in other directions to the other galleries and stuff. And it's just, just the simple way that he lays this out. So it's not clutter. It's free of kind of visual clutter. It's very, it emphasizes visual order so eloquently, elegantly, not eloquently. It's both.

[A]

It speaks to you.

[B]

Yeah, it does.

[A]

I think what's, what's interesting too, that I want to talk about for sure is there's actually this offset wall that separates, like, creates these glass panels that you would walk. So. So the ST is behind glass doors. And so it's like a separate space from the galleries, which is probably a good thing for like sound transmission. Right. The stairs are a hard material. You're going to get squeaky shoes and people, you know, walking up and down stairs and that that sound would bleed into the galleries, which is nice to control that with the separation. But that wall that is pulled off of the cylinder, this giant plane that just runs all four stories of the building is brick. And it's not normal brick. It's kind of an oddly proportioned, in my point of view, soldier course kind of CMU block. But it's almost like single cells instead of double cell block. If you were to imagining like what a, what a normal CMU block looks like, it's half of one of those and they're pinkish in color. And so again, Kind of playing with texture. And then. And then the inside of the cylinder that the stairs are in is a vertical thin board form. And so you get this streaking. And so again, you're getting this real interesting play of cylindrical wall, concrete, thin slat board form, flooring, polished terrazzo, dark, really dark, almost black. And then this pinkish color, lightly textured. Probably a honed block wall.

[B]

Right?

[A]

I mean, glass, kind of putting it all together. Yeah, it's really nice. Like, it's just super nice.

[B]

Like one of my.

[A]

There's four or five in the stainless steel rails. There's five different materials here. And they're all super tasteful, super high performing as far as maintenance goes. Right. Like, this is all heavy duty stuff and none of it's painted or anything,

[B]

you know, so if. And look even harder at that, the CMU wall. And you'll notice that CMU wall is almost a perfect square. And if you were to draw, basically draw a line through the corners, diagonally through that, right in the middle of that. The diagonal intersection of the lines that you just mentally drew is the number of the floor you're on. And it's just this simple little number. Just a simple, simple little stainless steel signage is.

[A]

Is not a big part of this project.

[B]

It is absolutely unnecessary. All you need to know. What floor am I on? Oh, I'm on one. So it says one. Not in. In what's even funnier, I don't see any exit signs. I mean, I do see some exit signs, so let me, let me restate that. There are exit signs, but, like when you're inside the stairs, there's no exit signs. Yeah, they're outside of the stairs, unfortunately. Damn exit signs.

[A]

Do you want to talk about, like, the ceiling here? I mean, that's really the last thing I want to talk about is the ceiling. So we talked a little bit about, like the coffered ceiling waffle, the triangulated waffle slab thing. But the other ceiling in this kind of utility core of the building. Right. We're talking about the utility core with the vertical circulation, the elevator circulation, probably the bathrooms. Right. Which is a totally con. Right. The service and the served. Right. That you talked about earlier.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Private and the public. And there's. So there's this utility core of the plan. And the ceiling here is open ceiling but with an extruded metal grate. And so very different. Like this just. This is very different from the really heavy waffle slab to see this, but also, I'm assuming, extremely functional. Right. It's not it's better than a traditional, what you would call now a drop ceiling, right. With just T bar because it's metal and it's. It's nicer, it has a night. It picks up the lighting a little bit reflective. It's. It probably. It looks like stainless. It probably is, but it's like, you know, so it's nicer than a traditional, what we call a drop ceiling. But at the same time, like, it's simple in that it's, oh, I can access what's up there. And we're not trying to hide what's up there. And we're putting it a little bit on display, but not fully on display.

[B]

Also an interesting thing is, and, and I know that you're. You've sort of moved on from the coffered ceiling, but one of the things that you notice about the coffered ceiling is that it's actually two ceiling. It's basically the structure then sandwiched, the mechanical and then the actual concrete kind of coffering is below all of that. So you've created an interstitial space for the mechanical. And so when you see the punch outs and stuff, those punch outs in that coffered ceiling are access to the mechanical systems or their areas to put the lighting, areas to put the sprinkler heads, areas to do kind of like the utilitarian stuff. But. And it was done in a way that is just. I want this to be a very. I want that kind of coffered almost. Yeah, that coffered ceiling effect. But I also know that I have all of this other mechanical systems and things that. That I want to do. But I also want it to feel very concrete, you know, pure and raw and everything else. But it was, and it was interesting and you know, we'll go into it a little bit further when we start dissecting the building. The concept of how he achieved that, that ceiling, it's. It's pretty amazing because what. It's just. It's a simple like basically sandwiching of mechanical between two slabs of concrete. And just how he achieved the two different concretes, one flat floor slab, the other one a very articulated geometric coffered ceiling. I don't know if you remember this, but I was somewhat enamored by how he treated the fin tubes at the windows where. And I don't know if you have a picture of that or not, but I've got one that basically he had what looks to be like a very exposed fin tube system with the tubes and all of that other stuff. But Then he wraps it with just expanded wire mesh. That's very strong. It doesn't get beat up. The fin tube doesn't get beat up, but you can see through it. And you can see kind of like all of the inner workings of the fin tube system. And it's just quirky and cool. But it's also bench height, so you can sit on it. And it's strong enough so you could sit on it. It's just this weird little simple thing

[A]

that honestly remember that now that. Yeah, yeah. So you're talking about the, like the indoor heating system.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

I mean, I'm. I'm a Californian at heart, so I have no idea what you're talking about.

[B]

Us, us East Coasters, we know exactly about radiator.

[A]

Radiator interior, radiator heating. Okay.

[B]

Yes, exactly.

[A]

You turned it into a bench, basically.

[B]

He turned it.

[A]

Yeah. It was really cool. Yeah, I like that.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Very interesting building. Very interesting contrast and similarities to what's going on 20 years later across the street.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Really interesting to see kind of both of those, you know, and what he Learned over those 20 years and how he chose to express these two buildings differently.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

To have that opportunity is just absolutely incredible.

[B]

Right.

[A]

To do these is probably like. I wonder how much he debated if he really wanted to do it. I mean, he probably needed the work.

[B]

He's an architect and just finishing up his biography. He was a horrible businessman and he was always on the verge of bankruptcy at any given time.

[A]

There you go.

[B]

Yeah. So.

[A]

Well, any. Any closing thoughts on this building?

[B]

It's. It's interesting in the way that it still speaks to you and it's still filled with all of these layers. But one of the interesting things is that there's a layer of complexity to this one that the British arts doesn't have. British arts was even more stripped down from this. And you're like, how could you strip down more from just like concrete floors and ceilings and stuff, but with all of the interplay of the geometry, whether it's the, like, the way that you were transitioning, as you were pointing out flooring material to. From one section to another to the way that you had block and glass and stone and all of these other different interplays. There was a lot going on in this building. It was very simply articulated, but there was still a lot going on. And so that 20 year transition between the two buildings almost. He almost discovered restraint, in my opinion, in a way that you can see and say Exeter, because here's the time frame of what were the buildings being built at the same time as the British Arts. Was British Arts, Exeter and Salk, and those were like. And they have such a very similar language going on to them. And then you have some other buildings which we haven't visited. Hopefully sometimes we can have an opportunity to visit them. But the work that was going on in India, that had. There was parallel things going on to the language that was going on in India, to a few of the things that were going on in the States. There's a. There's a building in Indiana that. Not too far from that I'd like to go and visit that has some very similar languages in its treatment of brick and arches and stone. That's more. That's less about what's going on with this kind of like trifecta of British Arts and Exeter and Salk, which are very similar in languages of at least, like the interior expression and how on the. Salk, it sort of takes that interior expression that we saw at British Arts and. And I keep giving away, like the building that I'm so excited to talk about in the future. You take these interior expressions and the soak turns them exterior. And this is something I know that you've been to a couple of times, and it's still on my bucket list, you know, high bucket list. And thank you, aia for next year because it's going to be down in San Diego. And yes, I'm signing up for that tour. Actually, no, I'm not signing up for a tour. I ain't signing up. I'm going.

[A]

You have to get a tour. You have to get a tour to get inside.

[B]

You have to.

[A]

It's not just open like it used to be.

[B]

Look, I walk around with a bunch of architects. I want to walk around with one architect. You.

[A]

Maybe there's. Yeah, maybe there's another way we could do this. Okay, so help us out, audience. Help us out. I think with this one, that idea that you had that he learned more restraint over time, I think that's really interesting. I think what's so interesting to me about these buildings is just how well packaged everything is.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

You were talking about these ceilings and these. The space between these two concrete things. And we thought. We talked about it during the British art, too. It's like those big trapezoidal shaped beams at the top that are also housing mechanical. And then there's another building we might talk about in the future that does something similar. It's just like the integration. The really wonderful way that all of the systems are integrated into the architecture. Structural, mechanical, all this other stuff we talked about, kind of even the fire department connections. And, you know, it's like the way that it's integrated is so thought through that that's what makes these so successful in my eyes as architecture. It's like, wow, a lot of thought and detailing went into making these as really pure as they end up being, just from an experiential level, which is where a lot of buildings fall apart. You know, a lot of modern buildings fall apart because we're all encouraged to spend less time on buildings, spend less time designing, spend less time detailing, get it done faster, do more with AI, whatever it is. There's always this kind of opposition of amount of time allowed to do the work. And then what actually happens when that happens? What's the outcome of that? So you look back at these, and I think that's one of the things that makes them so successful. It's just how well integrated everything is.

[B]

Yeah. No more hands.

[A]

All right. Until next time.