8 Propspect Street occupies part of the site where Yale plans to build two residential colleges. (Chronicle photographs by Lawrence Biemiller)
New Haven, Conn. — Yale University officials conducted one of their occasional tours for architecture writers yesterday, and the focus was on renovating campus buildings by the great Modernist Eero Saarinen — Ingalls Rink and Morse and Stiles Colleges. We’ll have more about the Saarinen buildings in a couple of days, but for now suffice it to say that the rainy walk over to the hockey rink led right past what a New Haven Advocate writer picked as the “Best Doomed Building in the City” — a Yale building known simply as 8 Prospect Place.
It’s far from being either historic or grandiose. In fact, it was always intended as a temporary structure, as its corrugated-steel exterior seems to suggest. Designed in just three months by Centerbrook Architects and Planners and constructed in four more, it consists of 21 modular units that were assembled in a factory in Milford, Conn., and trucked to the campus, where they were set on concrete piers. Highway clearance restrictions kept the height low, as the Yale Daily News pointed out in a review in 2002.
Indeed, it’s the building’s sleek, low profile that makes it so appealing, especially because the silver-painted, emphatically horizontal siding contrasts so perfectly with the trees among which 8 Prospect Place sits. Its windows — arranged, the architects say, “in Fibonacci rhythms” — are its other main feature: No two sets are alike. The glass-walled entrance, set under an overhang supported on plain columns, is at the back of a stone-paved court animated by a tree, three benches, a silver-painted rack to which bikes can be locked, and railings for steps and a ramp. The interior is plain — Yale wasn’t looking to spend a lot of money on temporary offices — but the ceiling, the architects note, “is animated by a de Stijl patterning of standard ceiling lights.”
Half of the building is still occupied, but demolition is under way just across the street as the university prepares for the eventual construction of two new residential colleges designed by Robert A.M. Stern, dean of architecture. So now would be a good time to stop by 8 Prospect Street for a look, before it’s too late. Unless, of course, the university takes up the New Haven Advocate writer’s excellent suggestion that the building be sold for $1 to a purchaser who can remove and reuse it.
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5 Responses to Yale’s ‘Best Doomed Building’ Awaits Its Fate
mcassidy2 - October 28, 2009 at 4:40 pm
I’ll keep you posted on the plans for Morse…
mhigbee - October 28, 2009 at 4:41 pm
when was it built?
drangie - October 28, 2009 at 5:57 pm
I, too, am wondering WHEN it was built? A glaring omission in this article.
12076771 - October 29, 2009 at 1:44 am
It was built in 2002 — sorry, I should have made that clearer in referring to the “Yale Daily News” review. — Lawrence Biemiller
occidentalir - October 29, 2009 at 11:39 pm
One of the things that I noticed about research universities in the 1980s was that many of them still had decrepit wooden buildings, all of them I think constructed in a hurry during WW II to house new or expanded programs, and which sort of just hung around for decades afterward. They usually housed grad student offices, luckless programs exiled to the less-desireable buildings, or the like. Building 20 at MIT was one such building, and I used to work in Harvard’s version (I forget the name), it was well away from Harvard Yard, blocks beyond the Science Center). Friends told me that Berkeley and I think Princeton also had such buildings. But I think over the course of the 1990s, those WWII-era wooden buildings finally were all torn down? Building 20 was razed and the Gehry-designed Stata Center is now in its place.http://www.eecs.mit.edu/building/20/I think Harvard built fancy new science labs where my old building used to be (or maybe I just got lost and couldn’t find it). It’d be interesting to see a timeline of the gradual demolition of these buildings, and if any still exist. For such well-endowed universities, they sure seemed to hold onto those decrepit buildings for a long time. AFAIK no one suggested moving and preserving those buildings instead of simply razing them.