The
Temple Street Garage Restoration was an award winning project completed in 2004.
Located at Temple and George Streets in New Haven,CT, it is the result of designs by Paul Rudolph and constructed from 1959-1963.
"When the New Haven parking garage was being constructed, the remainder of the buildings in the adjacent blocks was not determined. They should have been designed to dominate the parking garage...The parking garage is a peculiar twentieth-century phenomenon. The one in New Haven comes from the design of through ways. Most parking garages are merely skeletal structures which didn't get any walls. They are just office building structures with the glass left out. I wanted to make a building which said it dealt with cars and movement. I wanted there to be no doubt that this is a parking garage."
(Cook, John Wesley. Conversations with Architects. New York: Praeger, 1973)
Hmm. No real extravagant intellectual symbolism involved here. Funny how Rudolph unapologetically laments the dominance of his creation over everything around it. Perhaps, rather Rudolph should have been designing for the little guy instead of Ultramegaman, LLC. A more brutal version of Barbican perhaps? Brutalist Architecture at its most magnificently horrific.
