New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
The Yale Armory is no more
With no notice to The New Haven Preservation Trust, Yale has torn down its armory after nearly a century of use. This home to the Yale Rifle Team range and Yale Polo Team was in disrepair and not a shining beacon of any architect, social movement, or, really, any significant historic import. It was not even recorded in Elizabeth Mills Brown’s comprehensive New Haven guide.
Unlike New Haven’s Goffe Street Armory that elicited Yale School of Architecture study and Art Space Gallery full use, The Yale Armory was hidden in Yale’s athletic complex, visually clunky and largely unused for a decade.
But the 1911 building was history. It was the first armory possessed by a university, and funded by alumni, few knew of it, and, I am guessing very few will care about the loss of an ungainly, utilitarian, out-of-the way structure.
But its loss represents the expediency of the here and now that overwhelms the cultural reality of the history all of our constructions embody. “This page could not be found” on the Yale website as of the new year.
The building was deemed “beyond repair in 2010, and the “YPEC” (Yale Polo and Equestrian Center) was a dead building standing until it was removed in the last week.
The building has been wiped clean, creating space for some new function. Whether a field house or just a field, a building has ceased in all but ruddy photos and the memories of equestrians and sharpshooters representing a small number of Yale’s students. But the building was once the center of a military presence in Yale.
No building has rights on its own, but institutions confer them. Obviously no greater right of preservation was appropriate for this building, however the embodied energy of any existing building is real, despite the private property interests that have every right to be exercised.
But there is another type of embodied energy than the “sustainability” of thrown away human energy frozen in any building. There is a part of our culture that will be buried along with the disassembled pieces and parts of The Yale Armory. We will forget, forever, what made it, who made it, why it was made.
Yale has decided those questions are not important. But every building is part of what any institution is, was, and will be — even in its absence.
Absence can be evidence of ignorance, or it can be a memory. But memory is only present where value commends presence in our minds. The Yale Armory will not be missed by many, and soon forgotten by almost everyone — and that is sad for who we are as a culture.
Duo Dickinson, FAIA, graduated from Cornell, is an architect of over 800 things and has written 8 books. He writes for Common Edge and Mockingbird and teaches at the Building Beauty Program in Sorrento, Italy, and will be an adjunct instructor at The University of Hartford this spring.