The Pirelli Building

Hotel Marcel, the former Pirelli building. New Haven, Connecticut.

Since 1970, it has stood like a monument at the edge of downtown New Haven, Connecticut. But a monument to what? Capitalism? Brutalism? Minimalism? 

It is a massive concrete and glass structure that will not be ignored. 

Known as the Pirelli building, the former office building, designed by Marcel Breuer in the late ‘60s, has recently been renovated and re-opened as a hotel. Once again, after two decades, it has a purpose.

The man behind the redevelopment is architect Bruce Redman Becker who is based in Connecticut and has completed a series of similar mixed use projects involving old buildings that have outlasted their original purpose.

Re-branded as the Hotel Marcel, the former Pirelli building is a net-zero energy hotel powered by an array of solar panels on the flat roof and covering the partially open parking structure. 

The building was designed and constructed to provide office and research space to the Armstrong Rubber Co. The missing two floors in the middle of the building were meant to act as a sound buffer between the research space and the office space above. In 1988, Armstrong was purchased by Pirelli and a few years later Pirelli decided to sell the property. But the nickname - “the Pirelli building” - stuck.

The new 165-room hotel has been open for a few months.

The project has preserved and updated one of Connecticut’s most iconic buildings and an important example of the work of a well-known architect and distinct style of architecture.