According to Peter Blake (1996), a great building has several lives. In life one, the building or structure is completed and it is judged by whether it serves the intended function for what it was designed. In life two, a generation or two later, it begins to be judged as a work of art, as good bad, or indifferent. Sometimes life three starts many years later, at this point in time, the fact that it is a very old building makes it valuable regardless of the intended function or form.
As we look at the community of Fair Haven and New Haven we can certainly begin to categorize the standing structures following Blake's continuum. There are many of these buildings in each of the three stages. Also as new buildings go up, we should ask ourselves, if the building's function will one day be a landmark and make it to stage two and what purpose will it serve then.
A new beginning
There is a controversial relationship between new and old architecture in historic preservation. This controversy is based on the struggle between the new and the old between the wrecking ball and what has been called "architectural strangulation" (Overby,1980).
An example of this struggle can be seen in Fair Haven, an old neighborhood of New Haven, and more specifically, in the history of Christopher Columbus Elementary School. This year, the Columbus Family Academy (as it is now known), will meet the wrecking ball and a new school raised in the same lot. This dynamic is only the repetition of a previous struggle, where as a community grows, choices need to be made and new structures replace the old. Osmind Overby argues that "there is a bias that new buildings should not imitate the style of old buildings but should find appropriate and harmonious relationships with them through the control of volume, mass, scale, color, materials, and textures." (National Trust, 1980) This could not be farther from the truth in the case of Columbus Family Academy and, as such, has only reached to Blake's stage one.
If you look around Fair Haven you have to notice the diversity there is in its make up of its people and also on the range of architectural styles that make up the neighborhood. From colonial to federalist, from Victorian to neoclassic, to what I am calling the Columbus Family Academy, definitely one of the most modern building samples of architecture of its kind in our community.
In the same lot that the school is built, at the corner of Grand Street and Fillmore St., The Fair Haven & Westville Horse Railroad Company had its large wooden barn (c. 1860) with the horses in a building nearby (Monroe &Clay). The stable housed up to 450 horses. This two-story frame barn was torn down when the company exchanged horse power for electric power in 1893. A new brick structure was raised to house the trolleys that would become the new mass transportation system.
In 1965, Mayor Richard C. Lee, New Haven's Major at the time, initiated the beginning of construction at a groundbreaking ceremony of what is the current building of Columbus Family Academy, where once stood the old horse car barn. And just as Columbus Family Academy replaced three other schools (Cheeber, Woolsey and Lloyd) in Fair Haven, and was raised in the lot of the Fair Haven & Westville Horse Railroad Company, so now will a new building replace the old with something that will serve this community to offer an education to the next generations of students.
Another landmark in this lot where the new school will be located, and that was replaced by the building of the old Columbus Family Academy, was the Nonpareil Laundry at 271 Blatchley Ave. This laundry was said to have been the largest and most thoroughly equipped laundry in New England and founded in 1891 by James B. Moran. The Nonpareil went out of business in 1965 when it met the wrecking ball and was cleared for the new Columbus School. These structures neither made Blake's stage two, nor did they have time to meet Overby's " architectural strangulation."
Functions and Forms: A historical overview
In the inception of many structures, forms had a purely functional origin. Later the forms were so valued they were transferred to other materials. In the beginning form followed function. With those transformations, form came first and function followed.
The domes of famous buildings such as the Pantheon or the Serapeum, Villa Adriana, were conceived as forms and interior spaces and not structures. Thus, they were so valued for their associations such as temples, mausoleum, churches, but rather for their structural merit. When some of those elements are transferred to other materials such as brick or concrete, the form becomes a matter of structural concern and then it becomes a structural invention.
In the last century and a half, the many new technological advances in all of the areas tied to an exponential growth in world population made it possible for new developments in the field or architecture. The need to house such an increasing population tied to the advances with new technologies (mechanical elevator) and materials (steel-framed buildings) made it possible and necessary to begin building vertically in order to house and employ large populations. Mass-production of goods on large assembly lines made it necessary to come up with large building structures that could make this possible. Thus, technology came up with the answer in the form of iron-and-glass structures and reinforced concrete vaults. Because transportation and communication were seen as essential tools for society to growth and development, human ingenuity made possible to come up with structures and buildings such as long-span bridges, roads, harbors, and railroads, canals, for the transportation of these mass produced materials.
Nowhere before 1850 was there a precedent for a skyscraper, the modern factory, school, hospital, recreation center, shopping malls, etc. Most of these structures have been inventions that originated due to influences on population growth and migration, technological advances, industrialization, mass production of goods, and modern societal needs.
The greatest change since has been in the understanding of the characteristics of materials and the ways in which these determine the strengths and stiffness of what we make from them. Part of this understanding has been a new insight into the internal balances of compressions and tensions and into the ways in which these stresses and forces are combined to determine equilibrium.
