Yale University Art Gallery

Under renovation for a couple of years, the Yale University Art Gallery was recently reopened to stunning acclaim. For several years, it was a building I used to walk past, a part of the backdrop and scenery on my way to get to Sterling, HGS, the gym, wherever. It was on one of the main thoroughfares to and from home. In the past year, as the construction intensified, it became an eyesore and an inconvenience what with a good portion of the street having been dug up and overturned. Its side of York Street was completely cordoned off and you could only use the other side of the street or when it wasnt closed off, it was still walking a tightrope between open sewers, on one side, and trucks and bulldozers, on the other.

But now the building looks magnificent.

Architecture, the buildings we pass, the ones we go into for work, doctor's appointments, meals, shopping, whatever, has such an effect on us on a small, immediate level like our mood but also on a grander scale like the kind of inhabitants we are when we occupy a place. Denizen or citizen, the physical environment affects who and how we are. The Yale University Art Gallery was nice enough when I first got to Yale but I didnt really pay it any attention and nothing at all equalling the kind of appreciation I had for the clean lines and simplicity of the Yale Centre for British Art, also design by Louis Kahn (which, on the picture, is the grey building to the right of the art gallery's glass facade).

When it was being renovated, I noticed it for the inconvenience I was caused, for its ugliness, its walls torn, its insides, its insulation, pulled and revealed, chipped paint on the ground. Seeing it renovated, gleaming like an engagement ring, I wonder how fast I would move past this building, not because I was ignoring it, but because it gave me a sense of confidence that I was trying to return in the sureness of my stride, in the way the wind upturned my coat as I rushed to an appointment, a class, or a dinner date. I also wonder how late I'd be for those things, those appointments, that class, that dinner date, because I stopped to gaze upwards and admire this shiny new glass box and forgot the time.

I lived in a city, once. Well, New Haven. There are parts of it I miss considerably. The library, some people, some friends and especially my apartment; leaving it and coming home and the things you encounter in between that space of time.