New Haven Independent

Architects Barry Svigals (on the left), Jay Brotman, and a nifty bronze sculpture of Albertus greeted visitors Tuesday night to the fourth installment of the Town Green Special District’s Wine, Dine, Design get-togethers Tuesday night at Svigals + Partners offices in the Ninth Square. The monthly get-togethers put the city’s deep architectural talent on display, with visits to downtown offices followed by dinner at downtown restaurants.

Afterward greeting visitors, the architects and a sold-out crowd of 50-plus guests, but without Albertus, walked the short distance to Foster’s on Orange Street. There they bemoaned how representational art, such as the human body, has fallen off 20th century modernist buildings — and how Barry Svigals is helping to lead the way to put them back up there in New Haven, and beyond.

That’s where Albertus comes in. He’s a model for a telamon, which is a male equivalent of a caryatid, an architectural element that is also sculpture, which you remember from the Parthenon but rarely see on 20th century buildings.

Svigals, who studied sculpture at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, has made his niche in New Haven by believing passionately that sculpture belongs back up on buildings, where it used to be until our own modernist time. He began with door knockers and name plates. His big break came when he was asked to build the Edgewood School, in 1995, the first in the citywide school construction program.

“The schools program,” he said, “was a real opportunity.” The bricks on the façade of the Edgewood school have faces in them, done by the kids themselves. Likewise, the second school the firm did, John Martinez, has clay bricks cast in fiberglass. There are also to be seen gargoyles of “the Mayor and the Mayo,” as Svigals’s partner Jay Brotman put it, referring to the schools superintendent.

At the third school the firm has built, Beecher, a full-blown caryatid (shown with Brotman), in the form of a pied piper greets kids as they enter, and the school is ringed by a 600-foot frieze with laser-cut metal cut-outs of leaves and other alternating organic forms whose appearance changes with the light.

“Because sculpture is still considered a kind of luxury in architecture,” Svigals said, “we’ve had to find a way to cast the pieces in light fiberglass, to limit the number of molds and repeat them.” The way, for example, they’ve done on the façade of a new building at the University of Connecticut.

Since most of the firm’s clients are schools, the firm also has to make the designs affordable, Brotman noted.

The new Columbus Family Academy, which is in the midst of construction at Grand and Blatchley, is the latest where the beauty of sculpture is re-joining functionality. Beauty and utility, so went the theme of the evening, have been separated only by us modern weirdos.

Walter Chabla, the Svigals architect working on Columbus (with Fernando Pastor), said that the tapestry of different kinds of bricks, inspired by the work of Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, will also feature sections with Svigals-designed sculpture reflecting the four winds.

Why the winds? “Because it’s about Columbus,” Chabla said. “We didn’t want to be limited by the narrative but to have the kids think about the larger forces — waves and wind — that brought a discoverer here.”

With this spirit of playfulness, the architects have been successful, with, in addition to New Haven clients, Boston College, UConn buildings, and, in 2006, the new academic building at Albertus Magnus College. There a nine-foot bronze sculpture (as opposed to the three-foot model in the office) of the medieval philosopher and astrologer is also, like the statues in Greek temples, an architectural element holding up the cantilevered roof.

Two speakers joined Svigals on the subject at Fosters Tuesday night — a Svigals mentor from Yale, Kent Bloomer, and local architect and teacher Patrick Pinnell. In returning to representational forms, Pinnell, who has authored a well-respected architectural guide to Yale, said that his friend Svigals’ approach was not retardetaire, but on the cutting edge.

“New neurological research that shows the human brain is hardwired to recognize itself even in forms such as architectural columns. The Doric is Arnold Schwartzenneger, and the narrower composite column is your average teenage ballerina.”

All this interesting talk didn’t keep Giovanna Pucci, who works at Svigals, from enjoying the wine tasting, provided by the Wine Thief. She particularly liked the Sicilian table wine, made from the nero davola grape..

The next Wine, Dine, Design event will be Tuesday, May 12 at Robert Orr Associates on Chapel Street, and then dinner at Thali afterwards. For information and reservation, click here.

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