Forms of Inquiry

In 1969 Marcel Breuer completed the Armstrong Rubber Company building overlooking Interstate-95 and the New Haven harbor. It was a symbol of the city’s Model City Program for Urban Revitalization that ran from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s. The Italian tire manufacturer Pirelli bought Armstrong in 1988 and a short time later the building was threatened by developers who wanted to turn Long Wharf into a waterfront shopping mall. Less than thirty years after its completion, Breuer’s building became a microcosm of rapid globalization and the object of heated debate. In 1997, preservationists fought to list it on the state register of historic places. Pirelli left the premises in 1999, and in 2002, Swedish home furnishings phenomenon IKEA purchased the property in order to build a 300,000 square-foot store, largely demolishing the base of the two-story Breuer building to enlarge the parking area. With the asymmetrical, sculptural quality of the original design destroyed, Armstrong/Pirelli is now an empty icon of an age gone by, reduced to a highway billboard proclaiming: ‘Home is the most important place in the
world.’

Inquiry

Breuer as Billboard