New Haven Independent

The occasion was the third installment of a new monthly downtown happening called “Wine, Dine & Design.” Tuesday night’s hosts were John Apicella, J. Bunton, and Keith Krolak (left to right in photo), principals of Studio ABK Architects.

Town Green Special Services District chief Scott Healy and his staff created the series, which features lectures by local design professionals combined with social networking, extensive tasting of the fruit of the vine, and excellent eats at local restaurants.

The idea: showcase New Haven’s second most potent export (after education): design, from the architectural to the graphic.

Tuesday’s edition was convivially convened Tuesday night in the beautifully restored 1903 New Haven Water Company building at 100 Crown St. that the ABK team bought and restored and opened for business four years ago.

Krolak, Bunton, Apicella spoke about the nexus of the global and the local in their work: How, for example, a 35-story luxury residential tower in Tokyo or in South Korea has elements and approaches they bring home to their work on a house addition on Bradley Street, or in Westport, or to the renovation into lofts and lively street retail they’re engaged in now at the southeast corner of Chapel and Orange.

Above all, it was a love song to the architectural heritage of New Haven that these three practitioners represent. All worked for Caesar Pelli before opening their own shop, and Pelli is in the lineage of Eero Saarinen of the Ingalls Rink and Stiles and Morse College glory, among other achievements.

“What we have here is tremendous,” said J. Bunton, “and we shouldn’t take it for granted.”

“We always try to find a way,” said Krolak as he toured participants around the elegant rooftops-of-New Haven studio space, “not to mimic the past but to express the scale and the rhythm of the past as we make buildings that really work in the 21st century.”

Standing in front of some images of their take on the kind of development they would have liked to see on the Shartenberg site, Krolak said, “We created a series of discrete residences, smaller buildings. The idea being to activate the life of the street, running from Orange and culminating in a first-class hotel, the largest building, being about 17 stories, on the corner of State.”

When their developer/ partner pulled out of the competition to develop the site, J. Bunton said, they were still so committed to the project they finished the designs. “The idea was to bring the streetscape to life and to respect the context of the city.” Bunton said the project was difficult, in no small part, because of the demands of parking. “Unfortunately, parking drives all too many projects.”

The city awarded that prize to Becker Becker. Still the Studio ABK professionals feel enthusiastic about development possibilities in New Haven . The architects are particularly keeping their eye on the Coliseum site.

Studio ABK Architects, like many New Haven firms, has projects around the country and, increasingly, around the world. Healy (pictured here with non-profit executive volunteer extraordinaire Harvey Koizim) said that the concentration of architectural firms in New Haven is extraordinary, with almost 200 firms and solo practitioner registered in the city alone.

Studio ABK’s international reach is greater than most, Healy suggested, because of the Pelli experience of the principals.

“But frankly, if the city’s architectural firms had to rely on building in New Haven, they couldn’t survive. There’s just not that much going on yet, although we hope,” he said. “So they do a lot of work in Asia, where the growth is enormous.”

Why the density of practitioners in the city? “Other cities, during down times, sometimes forget about the arts, but not New Haven,” said Healy, wearing his booster’s hat. He noted that no other Ivy League school besides Yale has four graduate schools in the arts — drama, architecture, music, and visual art. “I can’t think of another city in America where you could go to a first-class architectural firm like this and then walk to one of the best restaurants.”

Dinner this night was to be at Central Steakhouse. Among other non-architect attendees were businessman Andy Ross and St. Martin de Porres Academy’s director of development, Kitty Champlin (pictured in the middle with her husband Ken).

Gail Bolling (pictured below on the right, with ABK’s Naomi Darling), who owns The Kitchen Company, a kitchen design company in North Haven, was impressed with Studio ABK’s space and the atmosphere of easy colleageship in evidence. She said she’d like to open a showroom in downtown New Haven. “But I need to wait a year or two,” she said until the economy improves.”

Perhaps she could rent the spacious first floor of the Studio ABK building. The Town Green Special Services District works hard to promote local business possibilities, and tonight’s event was unabashedly about business development as well as architecture and good wine. J. Bunton proudly showed a reporter how one of the Crown Street windows was smaller than the others and had slot in the base.

“Look,” he said, “this is where people came to pay their water bills by just dropping them in.” When the trio bought the building, they found an extensive vault in the back where decades of water tax records had been stored.

The previous two editions of Wine, Dine, Design were held at the studios of architects Alan Organschi and George Knight. Organschi fantasized on what he could have made out of the Coliseum, had it not been demolished; Knight talked about his ideas for development around the block ravaged by the Dec. 12 fire. The April installment of the monthly series will be on the connection between art and architecture and be at the studio of Svigals Partners.

Because the Wine, Dine, Design series is conceived to focus on design in its largest sense, the May event will not feature an architect but a different aspect of design, although the speaker hasn’t been determined. For specifics on such future Wine, Dine, Design programs and other downtown business development activities, see Town Green web site here.

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