Roche and Dinkeloo's Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University: Classical, Vernacular, and Modernist Architecture in the 1960s

From 1965 to 1973, Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo created the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. The center appears to be an essay in mid-twentieth-century modernism, directly expressing its varied interior programs in cubic volumes of limestone walls and reinforced concrete spans for floors and roofs. As Joseph M. Siry demonstrates in Roche and Dinkeloo's Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University: Classical, Vernacular, and Modernist Architecture in the 1960s, the Wesleyan Center for the Arts is a condensation of ideas from its context, including the seventeenth-century regional vernacular and the local Greek revival and contemporaneous modern architecture, including works of Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Louis Kahn. This article broadens both our understanding of the creative process as an integration of multiple sources and our view of modernism's potential to innovate while fittingly engaging with earlier periods without duplicating their historical vocabularies.