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New Haven, Connecticut
That’s a hundred miles an hour on a dirt road running away
It was only a two hour drive from Newport to New Haven but it seemed like forever, partly because most of that section of I-95 remains only two lanes. But once I got to New Haven all my favorite buildings were still there waiting for me. We’ll start with two of the best. First is a close up of the raw concrete, the actual benot brut of Paul Rudolph’s still radical Yale Art and Architecture Building. And then we have Louis Kahn’s British Art Museum at Yale where they are renovating the interior again, so this exterior view on Chapel and High Street is the only picture of it you’re going to see this time around.
Across Chapel Street at the other Louis Kahn museum everything is open and free. It has been a while since I’ve done a full visit to the Yale Art Museum and even after all that time it still remains pretty spectacular, both for the building and for the art, both of which you can see here.
The best part of the (temporarily) closed Louis Kahn designed Yale British Art Museum is its stairs, and here across the street at the open Louis Kahn designed Yale Art Museum, that standard remains the same. The stairs (in plan) are a triangle in a circle and more fun than they should be.
I purposely killed some time inside another one of the great rooms in the country, Gordon Bunshaft’s Yale Beinecke Rare Book Library. It was kind of cloudy at the time so the thin stone walls barely glowed, but that really doesn’t matter, the room is wonderful regardless of whether there is a glow or whether there is no glow.
The reason that the road trip stopped in New Haven wasn’t just to visit some old architectural friends but also to make a new one. I went out of my way to stay here at the Hotel Marcel, a repurposed Marcel Breuer building next to the IKEA in New Haven.
Not only is the Hotel Marcel a brutalist wonderland, it is also super sustainable- it’s LEED Platinum, Passive House Certified and Net Zero, which is super impressive. Even the room keys are wood instead of plastic.
I set about exploring the hotel, and lurked about to see its windowless top floor conference center in the morning before any actual conferences started. Despite there being no windows on the exterior facade, the roof had a glassed in interior courtyard and some really fun structural trusses that were exposed.
As part of my exploring, I decided to check out the stairs and I’m glad I did. I’ve seen this stair detail at two other Marcel Breuer buildings- one from a DOCOMOMO tour of the former NYU Bronx Campus and also at the former Whitney Museum, one of my favorite buildings- and that stair detail has yet to disappoint.
I had all sorts of plans to end this road trip up in the Hudson Valley, but most of the places I wanted to visit (like Dia Beacon and Magazzino) were not open. The one exception was Storm King Art Center, a place I love but still haven’t visited in ten years (I normally don’t like driving if I don’t have to). In those ten years a lot has changed, most notably the whole entry sequence which still isn’t quite fully open yet.
It is here at Storm King Art Center where the road trip slideshow officially comes to an end. The road trip of course continued a bit longer until I actually got home (I don’t live at Storm King Art Center after all), although the driving still left to do was super easy and all on local roads. I was a little hesitant even planning this trip at first- something that seems obvious when you remember that I have not done a road trip like this for a good fourteen years- but I ended up enjoying it and quickly started thinking of the advantages (no security, car snacks and water, no tight schedules to catch planes or return cars), and I even handled the god awful Hamptons traffic with less stress than you might think. I am not necessarily promising more road trips in the future, although I am also not ruling them out. There are still a lot of places to see that are too close to fly to, and honestly even another weeks long cross country road trip has some real appeal to me.
Of course all that talk of the far off future doesn’t take into account where we actually (still) are, and that’s at the Storm King Art Center. It was quiet on a gloomy mid week afternoon, and also kind of wonderful to feel (at times) like the only person there. If you don’t already know about Storm King, it’s a sculpture park south of Newburgh, New York that (for many reasons) is probably the best sculpture park I have ever been to, even if none of the individual sculptures are among my favorites. At Storm King it’s all about the overall experience, about the landscape, about exploring the park and, unlike me, not waiting for ten more years to go back to somewhere still so wonderful.
