Whig Hall: A Modernist Traitor

In The Chronicle of Higher Education’s assessment of Whig Hall, the building is called a “modernist landmark,” which may not have gained that title had it not been for a 1969 fire that necessitated its renovation. Biemeller writes:

“Whig Hall would have probably have remained an attractive but fairly unremarkable temple had it not been gutted by fire in 1969. Mr. Gwathmey, who died in August, was then a young Modernist who, as an architecture student at Yale University in the early 1960s, had been an assistant to the architecture dean, Paul Rudolph. Mr. Gwathmey and his colleagues at Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects shoehorned a four-story Modernist building into Whig Hall's surviving walls, revealing what they had done by peeling away the east side of the building so that its classical base, corners, and cornice became a picture frame for the Modernist structure within[...]The building immediately earned wide acclaim.”

That’s right. Our esteemed home of those old debating societies and the sister building of the one from which tourists depart was constructed by a dirty Eli. Whig Hall—which the Chronicle believes was “rededicated” today—may owe its glorious modernist reputation to Yale, but…we won the game, goddamnit.(image source: chronicle.com)