Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Marcel Breuer
American, Hungarian; 20th-century
New Haven, CT: 500 Sargent Drive
59%
Pirelli Tire Building (Hotel Marcel). 1970
In adapting this erstwhile office building into a hotel, it seems that the Hilton corporation destroyed the interior, which apart from some inspired massing in the lobby is mostly indistinguishable from that of any other Hilton I've been to. So we're left with the exterior, and we're forced to treat it as sculpture (which is only a portion of what architecture really is). As sculpture, the building is impressive if a little stylized. Breuer's decorative toying with his concrete — the frieze of depressions and diagonals; the interlocking panels on the short sides and the inset windows all around — results in a supremely balanced effect, but there's a sense in which it all seems like an apology for the structure's enormity, as though Breuer didn't have faith in his basic forms and so felt the need to prettify them. Another way of saying this is that there's too much ornament here, and it's too little integrated. (Perhaps the original interior resolved this problem, but we'll never know.) (TFS, 2026)