Preservation Trust Takes It To The Streets

Have you ever seen the windows on the fifth floor of the New Haven County Courthouse?

You can find them if you walk halfway down the Elm Street block between Church and Orange, stand in the parking lot next to Kebabian’s, and stare toward the sky above Wall Street. The windows look like glossy portholes on a giant, shiny cruise ship where people sue each other and get divorced. Viewed from Church Street, at street level, the building seems ​“heavy.” But from Elm Street, different openings — like the circular cutouts and large glass curtain walls — give the Courthouse an airy quality.

The New Haven County Courthouse is the fourth stop on ​“All Things New Are Old Again,” a virtual architecture tour organized by Docomomo, an international group that works for the preservation of 20th century buildings, and the New Haven Preservation Trust. The tour focuses on 54 New Haven residences, apartments, offices, and museums built from 1970 to 1979, ranging across the city from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Amity to the Salperto Rink Warming House in Morris Cove — an eclectic presentation of Brutalist, Modernist, and postmodernist buildings. Built in 1971 at 235 Church St., the Courthouse is a postmodern building, in that it uses the clean lines of modernism to contain a variety of ornaments and styles, often in a way that’s self-aware (a ​“pastiche”) and to a degree that is hilarious and over the top.

The seventh stop on the tour is the newly reopened Yale Center for British Art, the last building designed by famed architect Louis Kahn.

It’s located across the street from the first major building Kahn designed, the Yale University Art Gallery. Kahn was frequently associated with the International Style, which emerged in Europe between World War I and World War II and expanded after World War II and into the 1970s.

The eleventh stop is a modernist fire house on Goffe Street In New Haven, one of four modernist fire houses constructed during New Haven’s era of urban renewal as the city consolidated fire services. The Goffe Street station was the last of the four, designed by a firm that was then known as Venturi and Rauch, in the modern style … of postmodernism. It was designed at around the same time influential architect Robert Venturi was writing Learning from Las Vegas with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour; the book would help secure his reputation. The architectural website New Haven Modern remarks that the fire station is an example of what Venturi would call a ​“decorated shed,” in which external ornamentation is a defining feature of a structure.

An alternative to the ​“decorated shed” is what Venturi called the ​“duck,” the kind of building that is a monument to itself. The phrase has its origins in The Big Duck, a large duck-shaped building on Long Island from which a farmer sold eggs. ​“Duck” can now mean architecture that is a literal representation of what the building does, or architecture that contains the symbolic and functional value of a building — in short, a building whose form is part of its content. Local ducks include the Pirelli Tire building, designed by Marcel Breuer, built in 1970, and currently being renovated into a hotel (it’s not on the tour), and the Becton Engineering Building, also designed by Breuer (it’s the fifth stop on the tour). Both the Pirelli building and the Becton building are constructed from precast concrete panels, and in Becton’s case, the building’s height and structure help to integrate its more contemporary features with older neighboring buildings. 
 

Viewed from across Prospect Street the ground floor of Becton seems like part of a restaurant. Colorful patio seating leads the viewer to a glass wall, filled with a life-sized model of a brain, a plastic casting of some kind of animal tusk, and glowing lab lamps, making the ground floor seem filled with activity.

When I stood in the middle of Prospect to see how the Becton building talked to other nearby buildings, I realized that Bectons’s piers — the column-like reinforcements that protect the patio space — neatly align with the columns outside Woolsey Hall. 

As Preservation Trust director Elizabeth Holt writes, modern architecture can still seem ​“overly simple, unnecessarily harsh, and uncomfortably imposing.” ​“All Things New Are Old Again” is intended to raise awareness of the importance of preserving these buildings, and to demonstrate what these buildings have in common with earlier building styles.
 
The tour is thoughtfully ordered and the directions are accessible (on Google maps). They’re mostly designed for driving. I did not follow the directions because I do not drive and decided that a truly postmodern tour would ignore chronological time and sequential ordering. While taking the tour, time did feel different. Rather than hustling as part of a large tour group, I was free to break up my tour into segments, and rest or eat without worrying about inconveniencing anyone or missing something important. This also seemed to be part of the spirit of the tour, which intends to help people see the things that they see all the time in new ways. And the Covid-19-induced quiet that still characterizes New Haven’s streets is ideal for viewing buildings as part of an ecosystem, the built environment.

Architecture tours have been popular on design and real estate websites for years as an educational and marketing tool, but as the pandemic-related shutdown stretches into vague perpetuity, a virtual architectural tour can be a kind of tourism — even without leaving the house. All in the same day, a person can visit the Temple Street Garage and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, the Westin Bonaventure Hotel (the building that critic Fredric Jameson would diagnose as ​“full-blown postmodernism”), Zaha Hadid’s Guangzhou Opera House, and a selection of buildings by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, who once —18 years before Covid-19 — asked, ​“when did time stop moving forward, begin to spool in every direction?” and compared culture to ​“a crab on LSD,” staggering ​“endlessly sideways.” Everything is everywhere. The place is now, the time is here.

“All Things New Are Old Again” can be found on New Haven Preservation Trust’s website.