Architecture

All Hail The King’s Block At Bicentennial

by | Sep 30, 2016 12:13 pm | Comments (2)

Allan Appel Photo

Not too many Elm Citizens — even the most preservation-minded — can tell you at the drop of a three-cornered hat to name the oldest surviving Federalist commercial building in the New Haven area.

One woman who can is 95-year-old Deb Townshend, Fair Haven’s most eminent historian, and the woman who three decades ago saved that very building from the wrecking ball.

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A Library Becomes A Museum

by | Aug 26, 2016 8:15 am | Comments (0)

Duo Dickinson Photo

The library, before reopening.

Set to reopen to the public Sept. 6, Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, built not only to house books but to glory in their beauty and physical presence, is at a crossroads. Will the stacks, designed as a celebratory exhibit in a glass inner cube for all who enter, take on a different life in an increasingly digital age?

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Knights Tower Knighted

by | May 13, 2016 7:23 am | Comments (9)

Allan Appel Photo

The winner.

Whether you deem it an architectural modernist icon or a human-dwarfing iconosaurus, there’s no ignoring the Knights of Columbus Tower.

The New Haven Preservation Trust (NHPT) not only did not ignore it — it awarded the building and the team that restored its heating, cooling, and glazing systems the Landmark Plaque for extraordinary devotion to preservation.”

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Flight From Faith

by | Mar 14, 2016 2:27 pm | Comments (0)

Wikimedia Commons

The old Mishkan Israel building, now ECA.

There’s an architectural trend in secularization in New Haven, and it’s only gaining speed as we transition from the 20th century into the 21st.

The 1904 episcopal Church of the Epiphany, now below the Q-/Pearl Harbor Bridge, became a restaurant in 1944, then a plumbing supply house, then a strip club. The Calvary Baptist Church became the Yale Repertory Theater. The Trinity Home Church was taken over by the Salvation Army. The Henry Austin Design Chapel is soon to be turned into market-rate rental housing. The Orange Street location of Temple Mishkan Israel moved to Hamden, its building becoming the Educational Center for the Arts. It may be saving a building by adaptive reuse, but it means one bigger thing: churches today are in great danger.

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Triumph Of The Mind

by | Feb 1, 2016 7:59 am | Comments (1)

Yale Facebook Photo

The Nave.

There are not many architectural expressions of the triumph of the mind — of the religion of the intellect — around New Haven. But there’s one announcing itself on Yale’s campus, and it’s just gotten a facelift. Its name: Sterling Memorial Library.

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Architecture “Machines”

by | Dec 6, 2015 2:40 pm | Comments (2)

The 20th century modern master architect Le Corbusier once said: a house is a machine for living.” His Heidi Weber Pavilion was intended to convey a kit of parts ingeniously linked in creative use of technologically precise building bits and parts. 40 years ago, the job captain of that project blew the whistle on its lack of techno-bona fides: The Heidi Weber Pavilion had each piece wrought by Swiss craftsmen — no machine-age mass-production, more Swiss watch maker hand-made perfection.

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Eyesores? Or Brave New Buildings?

by | Nov 19, 2015 9:00 am | Comments (15)

New Haven is a company town … well, a two company town: Yale University and Yale-New Haven Hospital. Their building permit fees have balanced the City of New Haven’s budget. Their incredible allure and endowment create an arts climate here that is extraordinary. The architecture school has meant dozens of modern masterpieces by the worlds Great 20th Century (and maybe 21st century) Architects to be built: Ingalls Rink, British Art Center, Rudolph Hall. The list goes on.

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Define: Lick & Stick

by | Nov 6, 2015 12:00 pm | Comments (1)

The dozen or so new market-rate housing developments in New Haven almost universally use Stick Frame over Podium” building systems to create a good return on investment. Everything above the parking, public and commercial ground floor is built like a raised ranch. That very inexpensive framing technique has collateral impact: the nature of its skin. It has to resist fire, so in New Haven we have seen cement board on some, fake veneer brick on others, some synthetic stucco and, at Crown & College,” some distracting art.

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Astrotuf Plan Kicks Up A Fuss At Yale Bowl

by | Oct 30, 2015 2:45 pm | Comments (1)

The Yale Bowl is one of 61 National Historic Landmarks in Connecticut. Its grass football field, also known as the Class of 1954 Field,” is set 20 or 30 feet lower than the surrounding grade; the bowl is a manmade crater where scooped out dirt firms a reverse mount of dirt upon which bleachers are set and through which access tunnels are dug, using the super-cool 1914 winder material of raw concrete. In the last 20 years Yale has stabilized the ancient concrete battlements and tunnels, replaced a burned-down press box and built, for the first time, locker rooms.

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Raze? Preserve? Or Renew?

by | Oct 30, 2015 2:28 pm | Comments (32)

Scene of a May 2010 homicide investigation at Church Street South (left), frozen drainage pipes (top right), illegal dirt bike riding in a publicly-accessible courtyard (center right), and broken apartment furnace (bottom right).

When a Boston not-for-profit this week suggested buying and perhaps preserving the troubled Church Street South apartment complex, critics from many corners called tearing it all down instead. It turns out that a third, hybrid option may make the most sense.

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