Beloved by architects, detested by the public, New Haven’s Armstrong Rubber Company Building, an icon of brutalist architecture designed by Marcel Breuer, was voted Connecticut’s ugliest building in a 2018 Business Insider survey. Like many bygone trends, brutalism has since come back into favour, inspiring both and . The latter is certainly a more sustainable approach: to replicate the muscular structures of the 1970s requires a massive amount of carbon-intensive concrete. Instead, many architects are opting to restore the beauty of existing brutalist buildings, saving carbon along the way. Becker + Becker, , has taken things one step further, transforming the Armstrong Rubber Company Building into the first fossil-fuel-free hotel in the United States — aptly dubbed Hotel Marcel.
The former office building, completed in 1968, is included on the State and National Register of Historic Places. Its massing, which resembles an I-beam when viewed from the side, is a shining example of form meeting function. Breuer suspended the company’s admin offices two stories above its research and development spaces to reduce noise transfer between the two zones, balancing the concrete building’s imposing character with a sense of lightness.
The building changed hands in the late ’80s, then was sold to developers in 1999. In the years that followed, it became the subject of controversy. Though originally slated to be turned into a shopping mall, it was abandoned for nearly a decade before Ikea purchased it in 2003 and partially demolished the building’s base (to clear space for a parking lot), despite protests from local advocacy groups. Luckily, architect-developer Bruce Becker bought the building in 2020, saving it from further destruction.
Aside from power washing the concrete and upgrading the windows to highly efficient triple glazing, Becker + Becker left the exterior mostly unchanged, celebrating the sculptural facade’s minimalist material expression, including the precast concrete panels which frame the windows, board-formed cast-in-place concrete and terrazzo stair towers. The building’s 4.9-metre-tall trusses have been left exposed, lending a sense of drama to the 9th-floor meeting and event space.
If the interior has a vaguely corporate feel, that’s intentional: Brooklyn firm Dutch East Design sought to maintain the office building’s character. Several rooms, designated as Historic Suites, feature restored walnut, mahogany and ebony wood panelling from the original executive offices. The remainder of the rooms (165 in total), feature spacious open plans with kitchenettes and living areas outfitted with bespoke, mid-century-inspired furnishings in soothing tones and accented with repurposed ’60s-era lighting.
Nodding to the hotel’s namesake, each room features a Marcel Breuer–designed Cesca Chair, upholstered in a textile designed by Anni Albers, one of Breuer’s Bauhaus contemporaries. Though the design dates to 1928, it is one of the world’s most reproduced designs and feels right at home in the contemporary interiors. Throughout the hotel, a curated collection of artworks — which also riff on the geometric forms of the Bauhaus era — highlights local and emerging artists, many of whom are women.
Though completely upgraded to meet current code requirements, including ADA standards, many of the most high-impact changes are visually undetected. Hotel Marcel’s array of more than 1,000 solar panels produces over 600,000 kilowatt hours of energy annually, allowing the building to use 100 per cent renewable energy and operate completely fossil fuel free. Even the elevators are calibrated to generate power for the hotel when braking. Thanks to its new microgrid, the hotel can store power for off-grid operations or emergency situations. When the hotel generates more energy than it uses, it will contribute electricity back to the local utility.
For its ultra-sustainable upgrades, Hotel Marcel became the first Passive House-certified hotel in the U.S. last fall. With a carbon reduction impact equivalent to planting 342 hectares of mature forest each year, the adaptive reuse project sets an aspirational precedent for the hospitality industry.
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