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The reception area (1) and bar (2) retain a midcentury feel but feature contemporary furnishings and a warm material palette. Photos © Zach Pontz.

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Becker, whose past work ranges from one of the world’s first large apartment buildings with a hydrogen fuel cell (New Haven’s 360 State Street) to the restoration and mixed-use conversion of the former Pauper Lunatic Asylum on New York’s Roosevelt Island, finds himself drawn to challenges that require both design and development creativity. “There’s no client who would hire me for these projects,” Becker says, “and I don’t think they could be done without our integrated approach.” So, when he pitched Ikea, the Armstrong Building’s then owner, he did so with an unusual proposal: that he would create a hotel capable of generating as much energy from its solar arrays as it consumes, while fastidiously respecting Breuer’s design. Ikea, which had rejected numerous previous offers for the property, loved the idea and sold the building to Becker for $1.2 million.

A wall of clay tiles by Dutch East Design is a highlight of the hotel’s ground-floor public spaces. Photo © Zach Pontz

Perhaps the first thing visitors to the Hotel Marcel will notice is the geometric interplay of shadow and light across its facade, where board-formed concrete contrasts against precast panels inset with punched windows: Breuer knew how to do texture. Solar panels shading the parking lot and a simple black entrance canopy, along with updated signage, are among the only outward indications of the reuse. But, after passing through a compressed vestibule lined with board-formed concrete, visitors encounter a bright, contemporary interior designed by New York–based Dutch East Design. Here Breuer-inspired midcentury nostalgia, visible in rich fabric patterns and a rebuilt drop ceiling with original light fixtures, meets the Anthropologie aesthetic of globe lights, blond wood, and white terrazzo. Behind the front desk, a wall of reddish terra cotta tile, lit indirectly from above, seems to embody a little of both.

An original stair has been preserved. Photo © Zach Pontz

Dutch East partner Larah Moravek calls the interiors a “soft underbelly to an iconic exoskeleton,” and, to the firm’s credit, the interior design does engage with Breuer’s architectural language: at no point will visitors forget where they are. On the ground floor, the open sweep of the original space is gently broken up into an informal lounge to the right of the entrance and a restaurant to the left, with the building’s 5-foot module, expressed through the windows and ceiling, providing a useful demarcation of scale. These spaces are adorned with artworks selected by—and a few created by—the artist Kraemer Sims Becker, Becker’s wife and the manager of the hotel’s art program.

Upstairs, the guest room floors are similarly respectful of the 5-foot module—“a perfect system of a building,” as project architect Violette de la Selle describes it. Becker and his team reserved their largest formal intervention, the addition of open-air lightwells, for the center of the floor plates where daylight otherwise wouldn’t penetrate, enabling the addition of several guest rooms on each floor. Within the rooms, triple-glazed windows—part of a comprehensive envelope upgrade that also includes high-performance thermal insulation—block sound from I-95 while decreasing energy use. Power-over-ethernet lighting further reduces energy waste and enables guest control via touchscreen.

The corner guest rooms feature sweeping views and Bauhaus-inspired furnishings. Photo © Seamus Payne

A former executive office. Photo courtesy Archives of American Art

But in many ways, it is the Hotel Marcel’s top floor that is its most remarkable. Formerly housing mechanical systems, it has no outward-facing windows. Traversing its 16-foot-high interiors are seven colossal steel trusses, each weighing in at 50 tons, from which the entire upper volume of the building is suspended. Becker and his team are making this floor accessible for the first time, converting unused space to meeting and event rooms and adding exterior courtyards in place of mechanical wells. The exposed trusses will become central features of these spaces—a sharp contrast to the rest of the building, where the precast-concrete facade conceals a steel structure. The reimagined level is “about making sense of Breuer’s original facade,” Becker says, and, indeed, exposing the trusses—already hinted at on the exterior—reveals the building’s hidden structural logic.

Photo © Seamus Payne

Breuer’s work is easy to appreciate in its new incarnation, and that is one mark of the project’s success. Once you leave the hotel’s urbane interior and return to the outside world of Ikea and I-95, however, the strangeness of the Armstrong Building again starts to set in. Like Philip Johnson’s Kline Tower at Yale University (1966) and Kevin Roche’s Knights of Columbus Tower (1969), Arm­strong is a monument to New Haven’s urban-renewal frenzy—a relic of a heroic vision for the city in which monoliths dot the cityscape and buildings hang from trusses. The more subtle strength of the Hotel Marcel is that it brings the ordinary back to the heroic by inserting into a concrete relic the tried-and-true program of the roadside hotel. At long last, the commercial vernacular has caught up with the Modernist master.

Photo © Zach Pontz

Click drawing to enlarge