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New Haven, Connecticut
Ever since I was young it's been my dream that I might drive the Zamboni machine
I have spent a lot of time in the Northeast, which means that I have a love/hate relationship with a lot of things. One of them is winter, or more specifically, snow. As a kid I loved it, but once I started to drive I developed a whole new attitude. I know that life doesn’t stop when it snows, but driving and walking become exponentially more dangerous, meaning that it would take something special to get me to drive all the way up to New Haven, Connecticut in the snow. And this time, that something special was worth it.
Despite all of the snow and cold and wind and ice, I went up to New Haven to tour Eero Saarinen’s Ingalls Hockey Rink at Yale University. The tour was run by docomomo, a non profit organization all about preserving modern architecture, and the tour included back of house areas of the rink (locker rooms, training rooms, skating treadmills, the zamboni garage) as well as a stop for some New Haven pizza and tickets to a poorly attended Yale/Princeton women’s hockey game.
Also included as part of the New Haven docomomo tour was a visit to the offices of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates (KRJDA), the successor firm to Eero Saarinen and a place completely lost in time. The firm is located in an old mansion just north of New Haven and the real reason to go there is to visit the firm’s model room, where bits and pieces of decades worth of terrific analog work are scattered about.
One of the (potentially) fun things about these weekend trip slideshows are how they abruptly change direction from picture to picture. For example, we went from an old house in New Haven to an old courthouse in the Bronx, just to see When You Cut into the Present the Future Leaks Out, an installation by No Longer Empty, an organization that presents art in otherwise empty spaces. As a fan of old buildings and a fan of art, this combination always appeals to me, and we’re lucky that an organization like No Longer Empty even exists.
As you might expect, the art was all over the place, although overall it was pretty strong. Favorites included Alien Souvenir Stand by Ellen Harvey (see first picture) and L-Aber-Into by Teresa Diehl (see second picture).
We’ve gone from outer borough to outer borough and now we’re in Queens at New York Hall of Science. Designed by Wallace and Harrison, it features all of the exhibits you might expect in a hall of science, and one jaw dropping space above it all. The Great Hall is well named since it’s honestly a pretty damn great hall.
I have been waiting for years and years for this space to reopen, and now that I have finally been there, it certainly does not disappoint. The Great Hall dates back to the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and the room has all of the optimism that a 1964 modern building can possibly muster.
On a recent tour of the building, I was told a story about all that blue glass everywhere. Part of the renovation plans included internally lighting the building at night so that it would glow blue and become an unforgettable new icon at Flushing Meadows Corona Park. The only problem with that was that no matter how much light they put inside, none of it made the building glow. It turns out that the blue glass only glows with actual sunlight, and no matter how much light you put inside, it’s still not sunlight and it will never actually work.
