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Lovelorn Landmark
Marcel Breuer's Pirelli building was once a proud symbol of urban revitalization. Apparently spared the wrecker's ball, it may soon find new life marking the site of a Swedish furniture superstore
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Business New Haven
11/11/2002
By: Karen Singer
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This past spring, representatives of Swedish furniture retailer IKEA met with New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr. and other city officials to discuss the home furnishing giant's interest in constructing a new 300,000-square-foot store at Long Wharf. Their preliminary plan showed an eye-catching structure known as the Pirelli building would be demolished.
"We didn't realize it was a Marcel Breuer building," recalls Ikea real estate director Pat Smith, referring to the pioneering 20th-century architect and designer, who also designed the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and Yale's Becton Engineering and Applied Science Center.
"The [city's] initial reaction was very favorable, but the mayor said, 'Go back and figure out a way to save that building,'" Smith recalls.
"We told them we felt the front of the building was more important than the rear," adds DeStefano.
Over the next several months IKEA representatives met with local architects and other preservationists, and as a result, revised plans. To preserve the Pirelli building, for instance, the company reoriented the entrance for its new showroom, which initially faced Sargent Drive.
Also, if the city approves the project, which seems likely, the front part of the Pirelli building is to remain intact.
Shopping mall titan Westfield America owns the site, but Ikea has a sales contract contingent on local and state approvals. Westfield bought the former Pirelli tire company headquarters last year from the developers of the failed Long Wharf mall project.
"When we first came in, we didn't understand the sensitivity of the building, but we want to be a good neighbor," Smith says. He adds, however, that the changes Ikea has made to preserve part of the Pirelli building are as far as the company can go and still have a feasible project in New Haven.
But preservationists - as well as the New York-based co-designer of the structure - still are hoping more might be done.
Commissioned as headquarters for the Armstrong Rubber Co. in the late 1960s, the building was part of the New Haven Redevelopment Agency's Long Wharf Project, a major component of New Haven's Model City Program. Then-Mayor Richard C. Lee followed Yale University's lead in hiring prominent architects to design new buildings.
According to Robert F. Gatje, a partner of Breuer's who was co-architect for the Armstrong project, Lee rejected company chairman Joseph Stewart's original plan for a modest two-story building and recommended Breuer.
What made the building significant then - and now - is a "combination of its unique design and location, which is one of the busiest points on I-95," DeStefano says. "Hundreds of thousands of people see that building every day and it sort of defines the image of the city."
Breuer had exactly those thoughts in mind when he created a building in which the executive office space was situated over a two-story void separating the three-story base from a four-story tower. Using cantilever trusses, the tower is suspended from above.
"This building is kind of a weird thing to see, a box with a space in the middle, but in terms of the site it's appropriate," says Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully. "Everything about it says, 'I am not just a building; I am a piece of sculpture.' That kind of architecture was riding high at the time."
The exterior of the Pirelli building is covered with buff-colored and etched pre-cast concrete panels, an element Breuer used in other buildings.
Another unusual feature is a separate structure containing the building sign. This was conceived, Gatje says, because of Breuer's refusal to allow Armstrong to put the sign on the building. Because a city ordinance prohibited free-standing signs, Breuer designed a structure with a small room in which "to put the garden tools."
During a recent visit to the building, when local artists displayed their work for the public the last weekend in October, Alliance member Peter Swanson pointed out its four stairwells are constructed of the same type of material - half bush-hammered concrete and granite - as those in the Whitney Museum. Two of the stairwells in the rear of the building are currently slated for demolition.
Born in Hungary in 1902, Breuer studied and taught at Germany's famed Bauhaus School, where he specialized in furniture design and created his much-imitated continuous bent steel tube cantilever chair.
Breuer came to the U.S. the late 1930s to teach at Harvard at the invitation of former Bauhaus leader Walter Gropius, with whom Breuer later worked. He lived in New Canaan from the late 1940s until his death in 1981.
Coincidentally, Smith acknowledges that IKEA's Scandinavian furniture was "very influenced" by the Bauhaus School in the 1950s, and that its furniture still shows elements of the style.
In 1988 Italy's Pirelli Tire company acquired Armstrong Rubber for $197 million and took over the Long Wharf site as its base of U.S, operations. But within a few years the company relocated its American headquarters, leaving Breuer's once-proud building empty.
Several years later, mall developers began an unsuccessful attempt to make use of the now-dormant property. Their plan, according to Karyn Gilvarg, executive director of the City Plan Department, was to preserve the Pirelli building for office space.
Preservationists concerned about the building's fate, however, moved quickly to secure it a place on the state Registry of Historic Buildings in 1997. The designation is no guarantee of staving off the wrecking ball, but may deter developers or encourage them to incorporate an existing structure into their plans.
Ikea submitted its first formal request for rezoning to accommodate a new retail facility in September. Heeding the mayor's advice, the paperwork showed the company would not disturb the front part of the Pirelli building, but would raze the first two floors, leaving only the tower's bare stilts.
"We were quickly talked out of that plan," Smith says, adding that alterations were made after two meetings with members of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven's Alliance for Architecture, the Vision Waterfront Committee, and several other concerned groups.
During those meetings, the idea of integrating elements of the Breuer building in the design of the IKEA store came up, but ultimately was rejected.
"The one thing everyone agreed on was to make IKEA look like some kind of hideous appendage to the Armstrong building would not be a good architectural solution," Smith says.
The current proposal calls for demolition of the warehouse at the rear of the building to make room for 1,240 parking spaces. The creation of fewer spaces would "fatal to the project," according to Smith, who adds the rear panels are to be saved and "pieced together where the void will be."
IKEA intends to rent the building for office space, or possibly hotel or residential use.
Members of the Alliance for Architecture praise IKEA's willingness to listen to their suggestions. But they wish a way could be found to salvage more of the structure.
Among the possibilities are construction of a parking deck or parking garage, neither of which Smith says are feasible, in part, because the warehouse is located on the lowest part of a flood plain ranging from half-foot to several feet deep.
"A lot of people also are lamenting the loss of the warehouse will alter the counterbalancing weight of the building," says Alliance chairman Daniel Pardy.
They're not the only ones. Gatje, who has fond memories of collaborating with Breuer on the Armstrong Building, says he has been e-mailing a New York architecture firm working with IKEA as well as trying to reach the Swedish firm's CEO.
"When I heard IKEA was involved, my hopes soared because I knew them to be a company that cares about good design," Gatje says. "But I became downhearted when I learned they plan to tear down part of the building, and I'd like the opportunity to discuss it with whoever is making those decisions.
"The company should be able think this through in a better, more creative way," says Gatje.
Smith says he has not heard of Gatje's efforts to contact the company, but insists officials at the company world headquarters have approved the New Haven project.
Gatje believes if Breuer were alive, he would be "very upset" with IKEA. Nevertheless, he concedes, "Unfortunately, it's not unusual that a great many monuments of architecture are defaced or destroyed."
The IKEA project was scheduled to be the focus of a November 2 public hearing by the City Plan Commission. An October 15 hearing of the Board of Aldermen's legislation committee recommended conditional approval of Ikea's planned development district.
The entire Board of Aldermen was slated to consider the proposal, and possibly vote on it at its November 7 regular meeting.
If approved, the City Plan Commission must O.K. a more detailed site plan, and engineering, building department, fire and police concerns need to be sorted out. A traffic impact study also must get the green light from the state traffic commission.
Gilvarg says the entire process could take between three and six months but might move faster if the plan is submitted in several phases. "We have done this kind of thing before," she says.
The site plan can be changed once it's approved, but only in minor ways.
"There is room for refinement," Gilvarg says. Throughout the process, she adds, the City Plan department has been encouraging Ikea to save the entire building, and to use the most advanced materials in its parking lot to preserve as much green as possible, to maintain Breuer's vision of siting his structure in a park-like setting.
Although architectural historian Scully has not been directly involved in the effort to save the Pirelli building, he too advocates preservation, but points out it might not be a panacea.
"That building has to stand alone," he says. "If it's dwarfed by another building of another type it's going to lose almost everything."
IKEA hopes to begin construction in February and open its doors here in the spring of 2004.
The New Haven IKEA will be one of 15 stores in the U.S, and more than 170 worldwide. Features are to include a larger children's play area than other stores, as well as a 400-seat restaurant.
"This will be the only one with a Marcel Breuer building in the parking lot," Smith says, adding that his company's marketing efforts probably will make "some mention of Breuer."
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