A compromise in New Haven reveals how IKEA is furnishing—and changing—the world.

Story by Lisa Selin Davis / Dec. 19, 2003

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Model or cautionary tale? The 1969 Pirelli Building in New Haven, Conn. (Rob Narracci)

Traffic is always bad at the gateway to New Haven, Conn., where Interstate 95 splits in two, but drivers have a good view: On one side, the city's industrial harbor stretches out to Long Island Sound; on the other, the strange, graceful Pirelli building welcomes travelers to the third-largest city in Connecticut.

What travelers can't see from the road is that half of the 1969 building—the long cement plinth that extended from the back of its tower—is missing. In January of this year, IKEA, the Swedish furniture giant, lopped off the building's backside to make way for a parking lot.

The loss was a compromise between IKEA, the city of New Haven, and preservationists, one that could serve as a model—or a cautionary tale—for future battles between big-box development and the preservation of modern architecture.

The endless snake of traffic along I-95 is part of what attracted IKEA to the site, with direct access to downtown New Haven and its environs. And the city was just as attracted to the prospect of jobs and revenue brought by the company. The area around Yale University, with its elegant Gothic buildings, is typical of cities that succumbed to urban renewal schemes in the mid-20th century. While some blocks boast glorious Victorians, others are overwhelmed by housing projects. Crime is high, along with homelessness, and the city has been hungry for a big-box investment like this one.

So late last year, the city's board of alderman voted to rezone the site, allowing IKEA to build on land that was originally dedicated for open space. When Marcel Breuer designed the building 34 years ago for Armstrong Rubber, he envisioned an asymmetrical structure floating in a sea of green, a vision IKEA largely overlooked when it presented its plans in November 2002.

"IKEA brought a rendering where the entire podium was swept away," says architect Rob Narracci, who founded the Long Wharf Advocacy Group to oppose IKEA's proposal. "There were groans from the crowd."

(Rob Narracci)

There were groans, too, from New Haven mayor John DeStephano, Jr., who felt it was important to keep a larger part of the building to maintain its place as the iconic gateway to New Haven. IKEA agreed—though they wanted the land, not the building—but partial preservation wasn't enough to satisfy some citizens.

"Their argument was that the building was being presented as unusable, and they were doing us a service by preserving it," says Narracci, alluding to the building's five-year vacancy, save for a brief stint as artists' studios. "Our argument was that the aesthetic intent of building was asymmetrical."

If the building's asymmetry was a key part of its design, so was its landscaping. "The building was intended to be a pristine object sitting on a green space," Narracci says. Now both the asymmetry and park are gone.

"Our commitment was to maintain the architecturally significant tower and minimize the space we would need at the rear," says IKEA spokesman Joseph Roth. "We worked very closely with the city and a variety of interest groups to reach this agreement."

Preservationists requested that IKEA remove only the back of the plinth, cutting the building at the cleft where the offices ended and the warehouse space began, but IKEA cited the need for additional parking.

"That would have been 80 out of 1,200 [fewer] parking spaces," Narracci counters. "If you had cut [the Pirelli building] at the cleft, 80 percent of parking would have been within line of sight of the entrance."

Preservationists also suggested using turf parking-grass over layers of gravel and asphalt to maintain the green, but IKEA rejected that idea as well. "We did explore a variety of other options," Roth says. "The weather, the climate in New England, was a major factor in determining what would be best."

Turf parking, IKEA argued, was problematic in Connecticut, though Narracci points out that just up the road in Farmington, a mall installed turf parking over a similar-sized footprint. And so IKEA's proposal was approved, and now the 29,000-square-foot building sits next to the still-empty and now symmetrical Pirelli building.

A year later, there seems to be general consensus that this was the best bargain. "It's hard to hate these guys, given the current economy," Narracci says. "The board of aldermen felt that in this economic climate that turning away tax dollars would be unwise."

Roth points out that IKEA (named for founder Ingvar Kamprad, his boyhood farm Elmtryd, and his birthplace Agunnaryd) is more responsive to community and environmental needs than many big-box stores. "Inside our stores, we have recycling facilities, and the lighting inside our stores is energy-efficient," Roth says. "We're a privately held company, and we're allowed to make commitments to our long-term vision without being concerned about what analysts on Wall Street think." He adds, "It's a Swedish cultural thing about controlling your own destiny."

(Rob Narracci)

But with IKEA's rapid expansion—it plans to build five stores a year for the next 10 years—it's affecting both the economy and architecture of cities across America. Much like Wal-Mart, IKEA maintains a uniform, iconic look to their enormous stores.

"We build from the ground up," Roth says. "All the new ones we're building have footprints between 29,000 and 35,000 square feet, and a blue exterior with yellow and glass accents—the colors of the Swedish flag." For a company intent on making high, modern design accessible to the masses, some found it ironic that IKEA was so willing to dismantle the aesthetic integrity of the Pirelli building. After all, Breuer had the same commitment to affordable design.

"Every tubular chrome-caned chair you see is thanks to Marcel Breuer," Narracci says. "It's unfortunate that they didn't use this iconic high modern building. You'd think they'd save the design integrity, since they're supposed to be about modern design."

Some say IKEA's New Haven venture misses the point. "I think it's a lost opportunity," says Nina Rappaport, co-chair of tri-state area DOCOMOMO (Documentation and Conservation of buildings, sites and neighborhoods of the Modern Movement). "They literally can't think outside the box." The big box, that is.

IKEA insists on keeping the design in its products, not in its buildings, a tactic that will keep prices low and allow it to continue expanding. It plans to grow in existing markets, mostly the northeast and southern California, and in all likelihood, it will face this battle again. (The fight is nothing new. In East Harlem this spring, developers demolished the 1903 Washburn Wire factory to make way for a still-absent CostCo and Home Depot. And an 1838 house in East Greenbush, N.Y., was razed last year to add 75 spaces to a Target parking lot.)

But this battle was different, in part because preserving modern architecture is somewhat trickier than fighting to save older buildings. Buildings like Pirelli haven't had time to enter the hearts of citizens the way more historic structures like New York's Penn Station might. "Pirelli is much closer to us than Penn Station," says Theodore Prudon, president of DOCOMOMO U.S. "Time as a function of aging and distance hasn't taken place yet … It's in what I call the gray zone­not old, not new, not antique."

"They're buildings that we all grew up with, and you don't think of them as something interesting until they're threatened," Rappaport says. "They're considered basic buildings."

The goal, say both Prudon and Rappaport, is to prevent the same mistakes from occurring again. "Words like ugly are still being used [to describe modern buildings]," Prudon says. "But that isn't unlike 40 years ago, how they described Victorian architecture." Are we treating these vernacular modern buildings the way we treated the Victorian row houses that were razed to make way for them during overzealous slum clearance and urban renewal projects? Perhaps we're repeating history by paving the way for these big-box stores, the slum clearance of the new millennium.

Partially preserving structures might be a way to change that. "As a preservation movement, maybe we're a little more flexible about how buildings are preserved," Rappaport says. "Modernism is about progress. As preservationists, we still have to be about progress."

But is it progress? "The sweet twist of irony," Prudon says, "is that the preservationist who was once fighting for that row house is now faced with the fight to save the building that replaced it."

Lisa Selin Davis is a writer living in New York City.

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