A Reflection on the New Haven Docomomo US National Symposium

By Theodore Barrow, Recipient of Docomomo US/NOCA Symposium Grant

Since my attendance at the Docomomo US National Symposium in New Haven in June, a project that I have been working on with Thrasher Magazine has been released, wherein I attempt to tell the story of urban renewal and Late Modernist architecture through skateboarding. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, and I have been gratified to see that skateboarders in fact do care about architectural history and, in our own way, are deeply concerned about the preservation and maintenance of these surfaces and spaces that, to outside eyes, we might be slowly destroying. The paradoxical appeal of Modernist architecture is difficult to resolve: as much as I appreciate the motives of these Modernist visionaries, I also want to participate in a slow, entropic destruction of the edges and surfaces of their work through skateboarding.

The proper use, and misuse, of these 20th century buildings and spaces is a fiercely debated topic within preservationist circles. A critical moment in the Q&A, following the keynote address (Wednesday, June 21) was when Karen Dubois-Walton asserted that Paul Rudolph’s Crawford Manor tower, although it’s interior was being updated and the façade was being restored, would not have been her first choice of buildings to preserve, as it did not continue to serve the evolving needs of a newer population. This sentiment, which likely drills into the vulnerable, open nerve of any preservation movement’s existential purpose, provoked ire throughout the weekend. And yet this seemed to be one of the many compelling complexities and contradictions explored but never resolved—complicated, but never clarified—and the urgency of which spoke to the importance of how we preserve, use, and transmute history, both architectural and cultural. To put it simply: what are we preserving, and how can these Modernist buildings be adapted to contemporary uses?

Thanks to my grant, I was fortunate enough to stay at the Hotel Marcel, a Brutalist paragon originally built as the Pirelli Tower by Marcel Breuer in the midst of the most expensive and expansive urban redevelopment project in the country. Staying in an office building converted to a hotel brought to mind the recent controversy over Breuer’s 1963 former Whitney Museum of American Art, which was leased to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for several years, functioning as the Met Breuer, then later as an annex of the Frick Collection while their 1915 Beaux-Arts mansion was updated, and as of recently, has been sold to Sotheby’s for a showroom—prompting architectural critic Mark Lamster to tweet “what a true and utter disgrace.” At the heart of adaptive re-use is a question of function: what we can take from the past and how it can serve our present and future needs?

Sometimes I wonder if my own interest in these Modernist and Late Modernist spaces is not unduly related to my interest in “misusing” these spaces through skateboarding. Most of my favorite International Style and Late Modernist structures around the country offer, or at least suggest, great spaces and objects for skateboarding, and conversely, the best skatespots are modeled after these iconic plazas. From Lawrence Halprin and William Turnbull’s Embarcadero Plaza (begun in 1971, added to in 1982), Venturi and Scott-Brown’s Freedom Plaza in DC (1980), Vincent Kling’s JFK (1972) and Muni plazas (1963), these neglected plazas became international meccas for skateboarders in my lifetime. Of the three that I listed, only Freedom Plaza survives intact, while Embarcadero remains in vestigial form, a palimpsest of different phases of urban renewal and skateboarding’s trends.

Skateboarder Mark Gonzales ollieing from the 1971 wall of Lawrence Halprin’s plaza to the 1982 stepped addition by William Turnbull. [*Thrasher Magazine*, 1986.]

Being an art historian with a passion for Late Modernist spaces and a skateboarder often seems antithetical, like being an enthusiast of sand-castles and the waves that destroy them. However, a consideration of the qualities that draw skateboarders to these Modernist plazas and street furniture offers a parallel history of Modernism, one replete with its own sets of critiques, appeals, and other experiential conditions that constitute the enduring qualities of Modernism, indeed showing a way forward for continued use and appreciation of these plazas in years to come.

My appreciation of New Haven as a “crucible” for Modernism was thus two-fold: enriched by the many insightful talks I attended and discussions to which I was privy through the symposium, I also saw the many skatespots in New Haven in a new light. Of course, I gained new insights and appreciation for Gordon Bunshaft & SOM’s Beinecke Library and Paul Rudolph’s Temple Street Garage and EOC Plaza both as exemplars of a particular design philosophy and commanding vision in a period of audacious re-thinking and restructuring of American cities. But I also intuitively assessed them as potential skatespots. The height of benches, spacing, materials, and surface itself all factor into my own aesthetic delectation of these spaces. I have friends who grew up skateboarding the plaza of Beinecke and, in addition to the acres of smooth, almost seamless granite paving and rows of wedge-shaped benches that, I noticed, harmoniously echo the pylon “feet” of Bunshaft’s lucid box—one of the main reasons this library was such a popular spot was because the massive vents jetted out warm air, thus making an often dry and slightly warmer place to skate in winter.

Skateboarding flourishes in spaces that are historically under-appreciated by other city users, and thus the neglect of mid-20th century Modernist and Late Modernist spaces is, to my mind, inextricable from their renewed appeal. These are the shapes, spaces, and surfaces that I have studied and imagined myself moving through—landscapes of desire.

Of all New Haven’s iconic Modernist structures that I encountered during the symposium, Paul Rudolph’s 1962 Temple Street Garage stoked both sides of my brain. Even without the priming of the conference, its rib-like Brutalist cantilevered floors, soaring cast-concrete vaults, and monumental presence in the city would have drawn me to it. Arriving in New Haven via MetroNorth from Grand Central, towards the end of a month-long trip to the East Coast traveling by train (not cars), I thought about how Rudolph’s garage, built a year before the destruction of New York’s Penn Station (1910-63), related to the earlier structure.

View through Temple Street Garage by Paul Rudolph. [© The Estate of Paul Rudolph and The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation.]

Both look to monumental concrete or cement structures like the Baths of Caracalla in ancient Rome, both have soaring vaults, and both seem also to be inextricably linked to a mid-century modernization project of updating cities along the Northeast corridor in order to make these older cities auto-friendly. That Mckim, Mead, and White’s Penn Station was destroyed less than a year after Rudolph’s garage was completed speaks to a massive shift in both how people traveled to cities and also how architectural preservation was considered.

It's also hard not to see the connections between the cavernous loggia of empty ground floor storefronts and the makeshift shelter for the unhoused I saw on one of the garage vent benches. As part of a redevelopment project in New Haven that targeted under-served African American neighborhoods in the middle of the 20th century, leading to displacement and homelessness towards the end of the 20th century, it’s a cruel irony that parts of this largely-empty garage are now being used in this way. There has also been a longstanding connection between urban skateboarding and the unhoused, and often these two things converge in these Late Modernist spaces, be they in the plazas I listed above or here, in high relief, in Rudolph’s garage.

There was also this eerie feeling that I was walking through the modern equivalent of Penn Station–or the ruined Roman baths upon which both the garage and train station were based–a massive, beautiful piece of infrastructure that served outdated technologies (the automobile, the train), of yesteryear. Again, the ancient Roman sources of these structures popped back up, and moving through this cavernous modern parking garage felt like a visit to a fallen empire, prompting the challenge to preservationists: if these spaces are to be preserved, how can they be re-defined for future generations?

But: it is skateable! And the benches that weren’t being used as beds had an appealing patina wherein the rough concrete of the first cast had been smoothed by loving contact over time.

I learned later that this has been an enduring spot for generations of skateboarders in New Haven, offering both shelter in the rain and snow and ample open concrete spaces, and I wondered once again if these conflicting legacies were ever reconcilable.

In one of the subterranean half levels, skateboarders have built an illicit skatepark by dragging wooden obstacles, themselves modeled after street furniture that it is illegal to skate aboveground. This seemed like one possible solution, demanding future research. Perhaps, in addition to skateboarding, the different levels of Rudolph’s garage could be repurposed to accommodate other needs besides parking without compromising the design of the structure itself.

The onus of the blame should not be on the neglected spaces themselves, nor should the blame lie at the feet of the architects and designers who built these structures. Ultimately, the work done by the researchers, historians, and preservationists at Docomomo has and will continue to enrich my own research into these skatespots, invigorating the stories of these places that I want to tell. Most skateboarders are unconscious preservationists, making meccas to Late Modern spaces that they know of only through the cultural context of skateboarding. I seek to connect these potentially antithetical perspectives of architectural history and preservation and the history of skateboarding through my study of Late Modernist spaces nationwide, and the conference at New Haven offered so many great insights into how these interwoven stories could be told.

Returning to the keynote on Wednesday the 21st, Timothy Rohan said “architecture should be a healthcare issue.” How might we reconcile this directive that architecture and healthcare should be linked with massive concrete parking garages, vestigial plazas, and other mid-20th century attempts at urbanism? As neglected spaces that are activated through disciplined exercise, exploration, and play, these Late Modernist skatespots hold the potential to be just that. Good buildings have the potential to generate good activities. Skateboarding highlights the unintended but enduring appeal of many of these Modernist masterpieces.

About the Author

Ted Barrow recently completed his Ph. D. in Art History from the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), with a graduation date of June 2, 2023. His dissertation addresses the art and development of Gilded Age Florida, focusing on issues of national identity, race, and the environment. Ted has studied architectural history under Paul Jaskot, Marta Gutman, and Kevin Murphy at the Graduate Center, and has worked as a walking tour guide, leading architectural tours of Manhattan for a decade before moving to California in 2020.

His current passion and research concerns the intersection of modern art, landscape architecture, and mid-century urban redevelopment of plazas that have attracted skateboarders in the last fifty years. From plazas such as Lawrence Halprin’s 1971 Embarcadero Plaza in San Francisco, Vincent Kling’s Municipal Building and plaza in Philadelphia, to other Late Modernist spaces, Ted is examining the unexpected intersections between architecture and skateboarding. Much of his research will be presented as an ongoing online video series. This research will also highlight new ways of historicizing Late Modernist architecture and spaces within an academic context.

Originally from Austin, Texas, Ted received his Bachelor of Arts from Occidental College in Los Angeles before moving to New York City, where he lived between 2002-2020. He has received a handful of travel and tuition funding fellowships in his time at The Graduate Center, and has contributed as a writer to The New York Times, PIN-Up Magazine, Artforum and Juxtapoz. He currently lives in San Francisco, California.

Skate-Modernism

A Reflection on the New Haven Docomomo US National Symposium

Docomomo US/Northern California ∙ 33 Topaz Way, San Francisco, California 94131