Yale’s famously intricate, mischievous and referential grotesques, largely installed during the campus-defining work of Collegiate Gothic architect James Gamble Rogers, take on even more dimension and personality this time of year.
Except at Morse and Stiles Colleges, whose resident grotesques offer too little purchase for Halloween to take hold. Eero Saarinen, the architect of their physically and spiritually outlying homes, commissioned them from the prehistory-inspired modernist Costantino Nivola, in part to help connect the two conjoined dormitories to the wider campus. But unlike Rogers’s creations, Nivola’s grotesques, including the ones pictured here that populate Stiles, are so lacking in detail and characterization—so fundamentally modernist—that you might not even clock them as grotesques at all.
Together, they tell an aesthetic joke as good as the many cultural and historical ones told by Yale’s Gothic figures, even while lacking the latter’s definitively sculpted mouths.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims.
