New Haven’s outspoken development critic found new buildings to Kroon about — and others to pan — on a tour of the city’s rapidly changing landscape.
Anstress Farwell rode around town to offer thumbs up and thumbs down on the new landmarks that are redefining New Haven, from Yale forestry school’s Kroon Hall to the luxury apartment complex rising atop the grave of the old Shartenberg department store.
Farwell, head of a not-for-profit citizens group called the Urban Design League, has watched closely over the last several years as the city embarked on its busiest construction spree in half a century, since the days of Mayor Dick Lee’s urban renewal.
In the midst of a recession, New Haven is spawning new facades practically by the week. Architects are stamping signature designs for future generations to enjoy. Brand new schools have been popping up in every neighborhood as part of a $1.5 billion rebuilding campaign. Yale is constructing towering edifices throughout campus. Yale-New Haven Hospital is putting the finishing touches on not just a new cancer hospital but also on two nearby block-wide office, housing, and retail developments. The state’s largest apartment tower is rising on Chapel Street. Science Park is being reborn. (Sample all of that, circa May 2009, in this story.)
Perhaps more than any other citizen not on a government or developer payroll, Farwell has kept on top of those plans. She has attended the public meetings. She has reviewed the blueprints and legal agreements. She has pushed for designs that she feels learn from, rather than repeat, the mistakes of the past. Some battles she has won. Some she hasn’t.
She agreed to point out the three new buildings in town she admires the most and the three she most despises, and explain her reasoning.
Themes emerged: She’s not fond of phony claims of “green” or “mixed-use” development; some of New Haven’s supposedly environmentally friendly new buildings achieve just the opposite, Farwell argued. She sees some projects as repeating the mistakes of 1950s and 1960s urban renewal.
Overall, Farwell lowered her thumb on projects that “destroy or reduce opportunity for urban improvement,” ignore their surroundings, and favor cars over pedestrians and cyclists. She raised her thumb for beauty combined with function, for projects “that meet a challenge in a difficult spot and take the time, take the energy, have the expertise, to not only do a good building, but do something that really improves” New Haven.
Farwell’s is one point of view. Feel free to offer your own choices in the comments section at the end of this article, and to offer suggestions for future possible tour guides.
For the record: the Independent disallowed two of Farwell’s initial choices for the purpose of this new-construction tour: the downtown Gateway Community College campus (thumbs-down list), because it hasn’t been built yet; and the thumbs-up Yale University Press addition on Temple Street, because it’s already 16 years old.
Come along for the ride.
Thumbs Up: Kroon Hall
Farwell fell in love with the new home of Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies when she first saw architects, water quality engineers, and system managers describe their ideas at a City Plan Commission hearing.
Kroon Hall, which replaced a dingy old power plant, wowed environmentalists when it opened this April. It uses 50 percent of the typical energy for a building its size, thanks to solar panels and hot-water heaters, geothermal power, and natural lighting. It harvests and cleans rainwater in a pond, then reuses it for toilet flushing. (Click here for details on recycled materials and other eco-friendly techniques employed in the construction process.)
Farwell applauds all that. What strikes her even more is that … the building’s beautiful.
From the minute you look at it, through the heady experience of walking inside, Kroon Hall transports you. It transported Farwell.
“Unlike a lot of LEED-certified buildings,” Farwell gushed, “this one actually has astounding architectural merit.”
Click on the play arrow to follow along with her as she describes how Kroon’s exterior carves its own colorful, inviting space in between two more forbidding Gothic academic buildings. How the raised front courtyard offers an open view of the “Yale Whale” (Ingalls Rink) and the 19th century homes across the street. How Kroon’s pale mustard stone with oyster-color trim is in just the right proportion to the mahogany-tone wood, while the curved top playfully responds to the arch of the Whale.
“Human beings need to look at lovely things,” Farwell reflected. “Pleasure, relaxation, making you feel like you’re part of a place in a community — this building performs all of those pious functions of architecture, of being fitting, of having real beauty, and it meets all of the new [environmental] performance standards.”
The set-back building, the steps leading to the front courtyard, all “make it clear that this is a place” you walk into, Farwell observed.
So she did — into a bright, wood-paneled front corridor with benches in the center, up two flights of a wooden-walled staircase leading up to a top floor overlooking the “meditative” grassy courtyard of Yale’s Science Hill. In the process, and along with its energy-saving design, the new building manages to “echo” the forestry school’s history, in Farwell’s words.
Thumbs Down: IKEA
Kroon Hall made for a restorative follow-up to an earlier stop on the Farwell tour: the Ikea parking lot on Sargent Drive.
Farwell wished she could see the pine trees and the lawn that used to be on that land, behind the old Pirelli building. IKEA came in, paved it for a parking lot, and plunked a huge yellow and blue box there.
What city planners saw as a tax-producing shopping mecca right off the highway, Farwell views as a tragic missed opportunity. She would have liked to see Gateway Community College build its new campus there, preserving the landscaping, putting classrooms inside the historic Pirelli building rather than letting it rot from disuse, as IKEA has.
Farwell hasn’t gone inside IKEA. But she knows enough about the place, she said, to conclude that its business model dovetails with its architectural crimes.
“I’ve never shopped there. I think it’s a false environmentalism that the store promotes. They say they use sustainable wood. Many organizations are investigating” the claims, she said.
“The building itself is the cheapest kind of big box. There’s no difference in the business model and the building between IKEA and Wal-Mart. It’s a big box with a big parking lot. It’s based on driving to the store. It’s the kind of development that could be plopped down anywhere.”
Thumbs Up: Clinton Ave. School
Clinton Avenue School was already plopped down next to I‑91, a ballfield, and a public housing project in Fair Haven. When the city rebuilt it based on architect Ken Boroson’s design, Farwell said, it did everything right that IKEA did wrong: It made the school fit in, and it greatly enhances its surroundings.
She praised the decision to keep the old part of the school intact. Unlike a low-level apartment complex across the street that “cringes” in the shadow of I‑91, the main school building offers a large wall to respond to the highway. “It faces the noisy and unpleasant part of the neighborhood. It’s strong enough to be a force that dominates it,” she noted.
From the main school building, Boroson’s addition stretches out toward the ballfield at a lower grade, leading people to an attractive glass rotunda and then the open field.
Meanwhile, a new walkway — Farwell especially praised that walkway — takes people from Clinton Avenue, past the school and a new park, directly to the rebuilt Quinnipiac Terrace Housing project, and down to the river.
“This is the best of integrated planning,” Farwell said. She noted that the city’s parks, traffic, engineering, and school departments all needed to work together. And they did.
Thumbs Down: Lot E
Working together is something the pieces of “2 Howe St.,” commonly known as “Lot E,” definitely do not do, in Farwell’s view.
She started her tour there after coming from an eye doctor’s appointment. She saw an upside in needing to wear dark glasses because of the doctor’s visit: “It’s good to be half-blind when you’re looking at this.”
“This” is a block long collection of offices, storefronts, apartments, and parking. Especially parking. Despite the dark glasses, Farwell couldn’t stop glaring at the new parking garage.
That’s technically “mixed-use” design, a goal pretty much all planners and critics share in the aftermath of the urban renewal period. It means mixing lots of stuff people use all together to create a vibrant street and pedestrian-oriented space.
In practice, 2 Howe St. mocks the idea of mixed-use, Farwell argued. It keeps its pieces separate: the offices facing Howe Street, the apartments facing Frontage Road, the five-story parking garage towering over Dwight Street and Legion Avenue.
“If you look at it, it’s a little bit like saying you make a souffle with eggs, milk and flour,” Farwell said. “With a souffle, you kind of combine them, then it rises.” In this case, “You have the milk. The eggs. The flour. There’s no integration.”
And that garage — it dominates the whole project, Farwell complained. It makes the block more dangerous for kids walking to school. It kills street life. It champions cars over people and bicyclists. It’s ugly, a horizontal slab that makes no effort to integrate into the curve of the road beside it. And it has no relation to the other nearby new buildings connected to Yale’s cancer hospital.
She said the project a mirrors the mistakes of the Dick Lee urban renewal era, when the Route 34 Connector replaced a once-bustling neighborhood with a speedway for cars. A “continuous policy of urban planning that is continuing to create a degraded environment,” she called it. She rued the failure of an effort to submerge fast-moving connector traffic below ground until Howe Street, then limiting it to one road, rather than the current two that choke off the long median between them.
Thumbs Down: 360 State
Farwell sees history repeating itself, sadly, in another project down the road: 360 State, the apartment and retail complex rising where Shartenberg’s once dominated the block north of Chapel Street between State and Orange.
The project’s name is apt, Farwell said: It brings New Haven “360 degrees back to the redevelopment era” when it comes to “how a building relates to its setting.”
The size of the project doesn’t bother her, she said. (It’s alternately described as 32, 31 , or 29 stories.) Rather, she’s outraged at how the project will, in her view, welcome extra cars in and out every day at the expense of walkers and cyclists.
As with “mixed-use” development, this project offers an Orwellian version of the in-vogue term “transit-oriented development,” Farwell said. The city and developer call 360 State “transit-oriented” because it stands across the street from a newish commuter train station. That’s supposed to help renters ride the train to work rather than walk.
In practice, Farwell said, the building will discourage people from taking the train and crossing State Street to downtown jobs. That’s because the project’s design calls for clipping the State Street median to make way for a new turn lane and placing a circular driveway at 360 State for UPS trucks and drivers dropping off groceries or picking up people.
Meanwhile, the city agreed to widen Chapel Street and narrow the sidewalk to accommodate more cars — further squeezing out walkers, Farwell said.
That’s all bad for the environment, she argued, despite the project’s green rep.
The apartments may be renting for as much as $5,000 a month when the project is completed. Meanwhile, Farwell said, the “platform and slab “ design represents the “cheapest approach to construction.” Then there’s the outdoor space the project offers the public — six stories up. That means it’s not really a public good, but a “private luxury to be used only by 500 people, not thousands.”
Farwell’s final pronouncement: This is “the art of the deal, not the art of the city.”
Thumbs Up: 804 Chapel
But there’s hope — right across the street.
You might have noticed it. It’s a modest, three-story white building with ground floor retail. It stands at the corner of Orange and Chapel.
To Farwell, it’s a beacon.
The building’s owner, Bill Christian, engaged Studio ABK to design a rehab of the old building. What a great job they did, said Farwell, pointing out the work that’s just getting underway.
They’re preserving the building’s original design, with varied details above the windows at each floor. Farwell noted how the facade blends into the street. It wraps each of the designs above the windows gracefully around the corner, hearkening to an age when “corners were considered the premier spot of downtown buildings.”
Those designs become more playful with each story, “inviting you to look at the sky,” Farwell noted. Each floor has a different feel. “People look at that,” Farwell said, “and say, ‘foot, body, head.’”
She motioned to the flattened curves at the building’s top, the cleaned and repaired ceramic tile, the custom-cut marble at ground level. The owner is putting in recessed lights there that will illuminate the street not only for the occupants, but also for passersby. In other words, the public.
“Rescuing a building like this isn’t easy. This has the same spirit of a building that is jazzy. [The owner] understood this building,” Farwell remarked.
“It started off great in life. It was part of New Haven’s great downtown era, when people were building to a proper scale.”
And it shows that, in 2009, people can still build that way in New Haven.