Marcel Breuer was at the height of his fame, in 1968, when he was commissioned to design new headquarters for the Armstrong Rubber Company, in New Haven, Connecticut. His brutalist plan comprised nine stories of pre-cast concrete facade, with administrative offices suspended over low-slung workshops for research and development, like a head on a recumbent body. The stygian structure towers high above the parking lot, two interstate highways, an IKEA outlet, and the nearby harbor wharf. An eerie relic of the modern industrial era, it has largely been abandoned for the past three decades, since its subsequent owner, Pirelli Tires, sold it, in 1999.
But no longer: Breuer’s landmark complex has just reopened as Hotel Marcel New Haven, Tapestry Collection by Hilton. Designed and developed by Bruce Becker of Becker & Becker, it is also slated to be the first net-zero hotel in the United States, generating at least as much energy on-site as it consumes. Environmental sustainability was central to Becker’s plan from the very beginning, and will bring new life to a site that once produced parts for the gas-guzzling automobile industry.
Becker bought the building, in 2019, for $1.2 million. Although that may seem like a bargain price, it doesn’t include the $4 million required for asbestos remediation. (This also meant that most of the historic interiors had to be removed.) Still, its location is advantageous: Hotel Marcel will be the closest lodging to Union Station, the tenth busiest Amtrak hub in the U.S., and is located within near driving distance of the Yale West campus. Its upper floors offer dramatic harbor and downtown views.
For the interiors, Becker turned to Dutch East Design, a Brooklyn-based firm experienced with adaptive reuse hotels. They have taken their inspiration from the women artists of the Bauhaus, both a fitting nod to Breuer’s personal history—he was one of the academy’s first students—and a welcome counterpoint to the masculine bravura of his architecture. Each room has a Breuer Cesca chair upholstered with Anni Albers fabric and geometric hanging quilts by Brooklyn artist Cory Siegler. The circular forms in these textiles rhyme with a frieze of terra-cotta tiles and sculptural lighting trellises, both by Dutch East, as well as a print by Howardena Pindell, which hangs by the elevator bank. Before she won international acclaim for her punched-paper collages, Pindell was the first Black woman to graduate from the Yale School of Art.
“We wanted the interiors to be a soft underbelly to this design, which is quite strong and demanding,” says Larah Moravek of Dutch East. Travertine, terra-cotta tile, and oak help bring warmth into the hotel’s public spaces. The original sheetrock window frames were manufactured in hardwood by Stickley Furniture to achieve a similar effect. Original floor-to-ceiling wood panels line the most luxurious suites on the eighth floor, located in the former executive offices. “They look like the set of Mad Men,” Becker says.
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For those familiar with the building, the ninth floor holds a surprise: Becker has opened up the heating and electrical storage—a high space with 16-foot steel trusses—with a central courtyard and glass walls to let in natural light. The floor will host a second set of meeting and events spaces, after the punningly-named Form and Function rooms on the ground level.
In addition to its anticipated net-zero status and LEED Platinum certification, which is being tracked live and evaluated by the New Buildings Institute, Hotel Marcel will use no natural gas. The HVAC run on electricity, and the kitchen is entirely equipped with induction burners. Lighting throughout the building sends power over ethernet, reducing energy consumption by as much as 30%. Preliminary data suggests that the building can operate indefinitely off the grid.
“This project has raised the bar for our firm in terms of how sustainably we fabricate and the materials we use,” Moravek says. Becker, for his part, hopes that Hotel Marcel will start a trend for new hotels as well as the U.S. power grid. “If you build an all-electric building, as the grid becomes cleaner, the building becomes greener, too,” he says. The benefits accumulate over time.
Construction accounts for nearly 40% of global carbon emissions, with over 8% from the production of concrete alone. Set in Breuer’s concrete envelope, Hotel Marcel is a small but significant step towards changing that paradigm, one that honors the legacy of modernism while looking towards the future.
