County government center: 'The under-appreciated landmark in our midst'

Perched at the edge of the hallowed Yale campus, where it meets the scruffy heart of New Haven, sits the Paul Rudolph designed Art & Architecture Building. Fortunately, now saved from neglect and overuse, it has been newly restored (and enlarged) to its startling 1960 glory. In the late '60s I was fortunate enough to be taking classes in the then-new and very inspiring structure. It was a new kind of architecture in the '60s, replete with advanced ideas of space and light. And Rudolph has been acknowledged as an important innovator and master. His papers and designs are archived in the Library of Congress. Two decades later, when I moved to Warwick and began to restore 19th century farmhouse, imagine my surprise to find a rare and major Paul Rudolph building right here in Goshen - the Orange County Government Center. Unfortunately, our Orange County Government Center, similar to Yale’s modernist predecessor, has suffered too; its dramatic interior spaces are now cluttered and badly altered. After all, both were created before we were so energy and eco-conscious. (My house had sheltered families for more than 100 years with no insulation or air-tight windows until I began work on it.) Let us value the under-appreciated landmark we have in our midst and see if we can find a way to do what Yale did with theirs: Respect, retrofit, restore, rejoice. Our county would be the poorer without it. The demolition and replace option is just short-sighted and way too expensive. As Blair Kamin, the Pulitzer Prize winning architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune wrote on Nov. 8, 2008: “At Yale, Rudolph’s modernist castle soars anew....” John Wright Sevens Warwick