Projects by Name

Kingman Brewster, Jr., president of Yale, asked Breuer to design an addition to a complex of science buildings on Prospect Street in New Haven. Breuer and his partner Hamilton Smith created a rectangular building with a modular precast-concrete panel façade. The basement level contained an auditorium. The first floor housed a library and the second through fifth floors contained offices and laboratories. For the upper floors, Breuer recycled a spatial layout first conceived for the unbuilt Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. Windowed offices lit the laboratories, which lined an intervening pedestrian corridor. A windowless service corridor backed the laboratory spaces. The treatment of the long facades reflected the interior use of space. The western façade (offices) featured concrete panels consisting of narrow paired windows separated by a vertical fin, while the eastern façade possessed blind, faceted panels except for the vertical strip marking the stairwell that featured the window panels from the eastern façade. Breuer also raised the western or street façade on massive, branched pilotis.