Paul Rudolph and his Tuskegee Chapel collaborators get a close-up look in new Yale University exhibition

The overlooked contribution of Paul Rudolph, Luis Fry, Sr., and John Welch to campus life at Tuskegee University will come into focus soon via a new exhibition hosted in New Haven by the Yale School of Architecture. 

Their seminal work together over nine years to culminate the space known now as the Tuskegee Chapel in 1969 forms the subject of The Tuskegee Chapel: Paul Rudolph X Fry & Welch curated by Class of 2010 Yale SoA grad Helen Brown Bechtel in partnership with academics and researchers from Tuskegee and MIT.

The story behind its development and eventual construction, which, is augmented by original design documents, architectural models, and other related materials that stand out alongside photos from Ezra Stoller and Chester Higgins. 

Other add-ins, including a newly commissioned masonry sculpture by Tuskegee alumnus Myles Sampson and recordings from Tuskegee’s famed Golden Voices Concert Choir, help to provide a sense of its spiritual resonance and the "long-standing tradition of architectural excellence and craftsmanship" seen on its Macon County, Alabama campus after its founding by Booker T. Washington in 1881.

Rudolph, who was credited with conceptualizing its sculptural concrete design before Fry & Welch's stewardship led it to a more vernacular brick composition, said in 1970 that it was a "psychologically a fortress" for students of the legendary HBCU. 

"When working on the Chapel, I suggested a continuous slot of glass around the perimeter just below the roof, so the natural light enters the sanctuary diagonally. The roof is hyperbolic paraboloid in form for acoustic reasons, and the space rises diagonally and escapes through glass. The directions of the movement of space are in opposite but balanced directions, which is largely responsible for the dynamic quality of the space. In addition, there is a varying velocity of the movement of space. The floor is almost level, but the ceiling height above the floor constantly changes, so that the space moves rapidly where the ceiling is high but more slowly where the ceiling is low. All of this must be imagined, so that there is a balance between opposite movements of space and light," Rudolph would later describe.

The exhibition is timed to coincide with the new major retrospective Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, which is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through March 16th, 2025. It also runs side-by-side with the first in a new series of presentations from the recently formed Yale Black Architecture Alumni Group (YBAA) — itself promising a "repository is a physical manifestation of Black architects’ culminated knowledge and experiences across YSoA’s history."

You can visit The Tuskegee Chapel: Paul Rudolph X Fry & Welch at the Yale Architecture Gallery in Paul Rudolph Hall from January 9th until July 5th, 2025.