Monster Mash

Despite its thirty-seven level changes and bizarro telecommunication headquarters vibe, there is nowhere in Paul Rudolph’s Yale Art and Architecture Building to have a private conversation. Assume that all this corduroy concrete is sound-insulated at your peril. When a badminton tournament concludes on the fourth floor of our Brutalist landmark—now named Rudolph Hall, but still home, since 1963, to the Yale School of Architecture—you hear cheering on the seventh; when you gossip on the fifth-floor balcony, gossipers on the balcony above will listen in; call your doctor from the windowless upper tray of the sixth floor, and everyone in the studio thirty feet away will have committed a HIPAA violation. Nowhere is this sonic promiscuity more evident than in the building’s atrium-like second-floor gallery, from the center of which you can count at least five levels. Most prominent is the catwalk encircling the gallery’s uppe…