Yale U. has completed a two-year, $25-million renovation of Eero Saarinen's Ingalls Rink. (Michael Marsland, Yale U.)

New Haven, Conn. — Now that Yale has completed a two-year renovation of Eero Saarinen's 1958 Ingalls Rink, one of Modernism's most exuberant artifacts, the university is busy with a much bigger job—renovating its two 1962 Saarinen residential colleges, Morse and Stiles. Unlike the ice rink, which had to be kept open for the hockey season, Morse and Stiles are closing for 15 months each. Work is under way at Morse, with its students housed in an overflow facility that Yale built when it began renovating its residential colleges. Stiles will follow next year.

Left: A drawing by Saarinen of his initial concept for the rink. (Yale U.)

The $25-million Ingalls project was overseen by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, the successor firm to Eero Saarinen and Associates. The renovation had a number of goals. For one thing, the decades and the rink's interior climate had taken a toll on some of the structure's concrete, which was repaired. The playing surface was taken down to bare earth and rebuilt with new ice-making equipment, the benches were refinished, and a new climate-control system was installed that will, for the first time, allow the rink to be used year-round. Philip Kinsella, an architect with Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo who led a tour of the rink last week, said its other major components—the soaring, 300-foot concrete backbone, the wood roof structure, and the exterior cables that help tie the building together—were examined and found to be in fine shape. 

The biggest change to the facility was a 12,700-square-foot underground addition that houses training facilities, offices for coaches, and new locker rooms—and that gives the women's team facilities equal to those of the men's team. The addition is hidden beneath a parking lot that rises and falls in tandem with Saarinen's spectacular roofline. Glass-block walls and big windows let light into the training area, but the addition is so well hidden that you have to look hard to spot it—it doesn't infringe on Saarinen's design in the slightest.

University officials say the $150-million Morse and Stiles project aims to be every bit as respectful of Saarinen's work, even as it updates the two colleges with facilities Saarinen never imagined. It will also reconfigure students' rooms to create more suites, which are the standard in the older residential colleges, designed in the Collegiate Gothic style by James Gamble Rogers. Morse and Stiles, which Saarinen designed to look like Modernist, concrete-and-rubble versions of Italian hill towns, house 500 students between them in low-rise and tower buildings arrayed to create wildly asymmetrical courtyards. They have been controversial right from the start. Modernists decried Saarinen's experiment with traditional forms, while fans of Yale's older colleges complained that Morse and Stiles weren't traditional enough.

The renovation project, planned by KieranTimberlake, is one of only a few projects at Yale that have gone forward in spite of the damage the recession has done to the university's endowment. The new facilities—including a theater, exercise and weight rooms, and studios for art and recording—are being added under an expanse of lawn around which the two colleges' main facades wrap. By expanding the moat-like depression with which Saarinen had separating the buildings from the lawn, the project will bring daylight into the new facilities without altering the look of the colleges' principal front. The old moat walls will be cut up into fragments that will be reused in the walls of the addition. 

The additions to Morse and Stiles will be located under the lawn around which the colleges' facades wrap. (Both plans, KieranTimberlake)

The renovation, which will overhaul student rooms, common areas, and dining facilities, aims to make the two colleges more sustainable. Stephen Kieran, a principal of KieranTimberlake, said last week that the architects, working with the landscape-architecture firm Olin, hoped to be able to create water features in the courtyards that would both capture rainwater and make outdoor dining for the students more interesting.

Next year Yale plans to celebrate Saarinen, who graduated from the university's architecture school in 1934, with an exhibition of drawings, models, photographs, and other artifacts. It will be on view from February 19 to May 2 in the architecture school and the campus art gallery.

You can see more images of Ingalls Rink and Morse and Stiles by clicking below.