Original Post, 4/29/08: April 2008 photographs of new buildings currently rising in Downtown New Haven. Through their unique material expression, these new works offer a window into contemporary life in New Haven.
Pictures include: Gwathmey Siegel's Loria Center for the History of Art and Rudolph Building Renovation at Yale on York (zinc panels and limestone facade), Cesar Pelli's Arts and Humanities Magnet High School on College (glass with elm leaves motif and copper stair towers and roof details), Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg's new Chapel Street hotel (glass curtain wall with color glass detail), Hopkins Architect's Kroon Hall at Yale (designed to be the most environmentally friendly building in the United States in terms of CO2 reduction, showing wood truss structure), and Studio ABK's historic renovation of a stunning building on the corner of Chapel and Orange (restored terra cotta and marble details at street level). Click to enlarge the photos.
With major new commissions such as the Yale School of Management New Campus (Sir Norman Foster), College Square (Robert A.M. Stern), 55 Park Street (Svigals + Partners and Behnisch Architects), Yale-New Haven Hospital's new 500,000 square-foot Cancer Hospital (SBRA), 360 State (Becker + Becker), University Health Services (Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam) and Gateway Community College (Perkins + Will) -- and many others -- currently in design or construction, the image of Downtown New Haven will be changing for years to come. Can New Haven sustain its longstanding reputation as a place for some of the nation's most groundbreaking architecture and design?
Update 6/2/08: Chronicle of Higher Education's Buildings and Grounds site has a great new article about the Loria Center, which explains some of its interesting material qualities in greater detail. The irregular stone box of the Loria Center seems like a proper formal response to the idea of Yale being a stone campus, with each building featuring some kind of unique element in that material. In that way it can be iconic, but contextual. One of our readers points out that "it is very difficult to find a material compatible with concrete.... this stone, with its colors shifting from oyster to rust does it well."
Update 6/6/08: Another article from the Chronicle asks, what would you have done?
4 comments:
Great pics, thanks!
Can anyone explain to me the wooden truss structurce on the top of the Forestry School Building? World's biggest attic? I thought maybe it was to be a greenhouse, but it looks like it is being covered over.
Unless I'm mistaken, I believe that is going to be an arched ceiling for the topmost rooms (a lounge). You can find more information here:
http://environment.yale.edu/kroon/
Pedro -- thanks for the link. Looks like there is also a 175 auditorium up there.
The new Loria Center is a major disappointment to me.
I guess everyone has expected the addition to be in dialoque with the brutalist modern rudolph building and the neo-gothic Yale architecture. A building in context with those two extremes almost had to make a statement about architecture at the beginning of 21st century. Or so I thought.
What I found instead was a boring facade made of limestone panels that look like CMU in texture, color and coursing. What I did not find was any dialogue with the existing. Someone said sowjet nuclear reactor. I was thinking shopping mall. Hopefully that is not the statement.
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