Stephen Kobasa Photograph
Pelli Clarke Pelli, architects
Daniel L. Malone Engineering Research Building, 2005
Yale University
55 Prospect St.
What happens when a famed architect works at home is most recently evident in Cesar Pelli’s Co-op Arts and Humanities High School, with its etched glass which looks at a distance as if it had been shattered by riots. But this Yale building completed five years ago is completely realized from every point of view, particularly in the curvature of its glass curtain against the walled ditch of the former canal. At the high school, there is a self-conscious theatricality to the aquarium opening onto the dance studio that juts above one of the entryways. Here, the transparency of motion within the building derives from ordinary passersby on their way to office or classroom, making corridors in the air.
And the building brackets one of the most consistently splendid ensembles of architecture in the city, continuing along Prospect Street with the brick Renaissance fortress of what was once a training building for Yale’s military cadets, and a Marcel Breuer griddle with its new cornice of toy windmills, ending in art deco gothic at the corner of Grove.
The Pelli building did require the cutting down of one of the last surviving original elm trees in the city, but what would a Yale project be without some small ravaging of the landscape.? At least here it was a price worth paying.
See previous Object Lessons here.