The Beinecke Library Manuscript and Rare Books Library at Yale University

Following my appointment with Jessica Quagliaroli, Architecture Records Archivist at Yale University, School of Architecture, my first architectural stop at the campus was the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library designed under the leadership of Gordon Bunshaft of SOM-NYC office and completed in 1963. When I was a research scholar at the Columbia University, GSAPP, Ph.D. Program, I conducted a second research in addition to my Ph.D. studies at the program: With the help of Mustafa Kemal Abadan, a design partner at SOM, NYC office , I examined four SOM buildings designed under the leadership of Gordon Bunshaft with an emphasis on design architect’s creativity and client’s economic and commercial expectation in 1960s-1970s. Our selection criteria of those four buildings by SOM-NYC office was changing profiles of client in time and its influence on design architect’s creativity in practice. On this basis, we focused on corporate client, commercial client, multi-headed client and how they affected architectural creativity of Gordon Bunshaft as the design leader at SOM-NYC office in the 1960s-1970s. In-depth scholarly essays and Ph.D. dissertation by Reinhold Martin including the practice history of Gordon Bunshaft/SOM, theoretical sources at the Avery Library on architectural (design) practice and more specifically on deign architect-(various profiles of) client relations, literature review on history of SOM-NYC office, monography by Nicholas Adams, books by Dana Cuff, Robert Gutman, Judith Blau, Mary Norman Woods, etc. helped me to build my scholarly foundation on scholarly examination of architectural design practice, its history(historiography) with the emphasis of its sociological aspect, and more particularly design architect’s creativity and the client’s economic or commercial expectation. In addition to all of those things, my appointments with Kenneth Frampton and Reinhold Martin helped me to clarify the essential research problem of my Ph.D. dissertation (on postwar Turkish architecture and Sisa-Tekeli-Hepguler Architecture Partnership in Istanbul), its main hypothesis, and methodology with theoretical sources at the Avery Library. After all of those scholarly experiences, it was one of the special moments for me to visit “the Beinecke Library” at Yale University that completed in 1963. Needless to say, Yale University could stimulate a rare synthesis of architectural and artistic creativity by Gordon Bunshaft with this one of the significant and iconic landmarks of postwar architecture in the US.