“I like the story of the boy on the Yale hockey team who said, when he looked up at the concrete arch, it made him feel, ‘Go! Go! Go!’”
—Eero Saarinen, in a letter to a friend (Eero Saarinen on His Work, 1962)
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Last Tuesday marked the start of a new Yale hockey season at David S. Ingalls Rink, where the women’s team walloped Saint Anselm 9-0. If the name of the arena doesn’t ring a bell, perhaps that’s because you know it as “The Whale,” in part for its distinctive, biomorphic 300-foot spine—the “concrete arch” Saarinen was talking about. The famed modernist architect and 1934 graduate of the Yale School of Architecture designed and oversaw construction of the arena, which he envisioned as a “graceful” and “dynamic building” and hosted its first official game in December 1958.
In those days, of course, only men could enroll in Yale College, so Saarinen used the words “boy on the Yale hockey team” advisedly. But recently, the Yale women’s team has ascended to unprecedented heights, reaching the national semifinals in 2023. Their counterparts, the men, open their season at Ingalls this weekend with a daunting two-game series against the University of Denver, the defending national champion who also won it all two years before.
By my reckoning, I’ve been going to Yale hockey games—as a fan, a writer, a radio and TV announcer or statistician—on and off for 35 years. I grew up in the New Haven area, and I probably made my first pilgrimage to Ingalls Rink, named for father and son Yale hockey captains who funded much of the arena’s construction, when I was about eight years old. It was my introduction to hockey rinks, so to my untrained eye, the seemingly physics-defying gem—with its pitched concave sides, suspended roof and whimsical illuminated tail—was, well, normal. Only when I started to visit sports venues around the country did I come to understand that the rink at Sachem and Prospect Streets is among the most unique and artistic arenas in America.
In the early 1950s, Yale President A. Whitney Griswold initially approached Saarinen to add a different look to Yale’s campus, requesting designs for academic buildings and an addition to the Yale Art Gallery. But those projects never came to fruition. A few years later, with the Yale hockey team finding the facilities inadequate at the smoke-filled, chain link-fenced New Haven Arena, momentum began to build in favor of a new rink that would extend Yale’s campus to the north.
But what kind of building would it be? According to an essay by Michael Rey in Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future (2006), which accompanied a globetrotting exhibition of the same name, the Yale Hockey Association wanted a design that would merely meet basic functional requirements. The group recommended hiring New York City’s Rogers and Butler, the successor firm to that of James Gamble Rogers, who famously designed Yale’s Collegiate Gothic campus.
Other Yale administrators endorsed this generic approach but ultimately left the choice up to Griswold, who once again had a grander ambition. “A great university should look at architecture as a way of expressing itself,” he reportedly once said, and he wanted this expression to integrate modernism. So he again turned to Saarinen, whose professional vocabulary did not include the word “generic.”
As biographer Jayne Merkel writes in Eero Saarinen (2005), the architect “wanted… to come up with a form that seemed particularly appropriate for this purpose—something playful with a big, vigorous sweep like those of hockey players gliding along the ice.” The backbone of the plan—and the building—was the concrete arch, which provides the structural sweep and scope to make the design so striking. Writes Merkel, “From the outside, the hockey rink resembles a gigantic, humped, slithering beast or, some say, an overturned Viking ship. From the inside, it sweeps you up in a skating movement. Here, perhaps more than anywhere else, Eero Saarinen operated as a sculptor as well as an architect; he created three-dimensional forms that not only were vaguely representational but, like the surrealistic shapes they resemble, also reflected subconscious experience.”
But in 1956, even long after modernism’s establishment as a major architectural movement, the plan was controversial. According to Rey, detractors included alumni, Athletic Director Delaney Kiphuth and, most consequentially, Louise Harkness Ingalls, the respective wife and mother of the building’s namesakes. Yet Griswold and Saarinen, with help from members of the art history department, vigorously defended the design and ultimately prevailed upon Mrs. Ingalls to allow the project to move forward. And she continued to support it even when its cost ballooned to around $1.4 million, about double the original estimate. Ultimately, Rey writes, the Ingalls family was “delighted” with the rink.
Saarinen himself anticipated that the building would generate all manner of interpretations. “The David S. Ingalls Skating Rink is deliberately not an ordinary building,” he said during a 1957 speech. “When it is finished, it will probably have many names, because people like to find names for extraordinary buildings. It may be called ‘the Roller Coaster,’ or ‘the Pregnant Whale,’ or ‘the Turtle,’ or ‘the giant boat upside-down.’”
Once it was built, observers settled on “The Yale Whale” or simply, as is preferred today, “The Whale.” Still, when Paul Goldberger, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic and writer, arrived in New Haven for his freshman year at Yale in 1968, the building remained a polarizing subject on campus. “You couldn’t not feel it had a certain allure,” Goldberger recalls from when he first experienced Ingalls. “It was not a typical hockey rink or academic building or New Haven building. It was clearly making a dramatic statement. On the other hand, this was a time when everyone was beginning to get into a kind of feeling that modern architecture had overplayed its hand a little bit, that it was a little too overbearing and heroic.”
Some detractors also didn’t like that the arena didn’t seem to fit with its neighborhood surroundings. “Contextualism was beginning to be a big deal,” Goldberger says. “That is, the idea that a building has to pay attention to what’s around it. I think I was torn between thinking this was exciting and dramatic but increasingly wondering if ‘exciting and dramatic’ was the first obligation of architecture.”
But as the years passed and the rink became a local fixture, critics—Goldberger included—found it less of an intrusion and more of an asset. “Over time, I mellowed a lot about the building,” he says. “I came to realize that while, yes, it’s important for buildings to relate to their context, and most buildings have an obligation to do so, there are always moments when exceptions are justified. If Frank Lloyd Wright had cared about contextualism, the Guggenheim [in New York City] would not have been as great a building as it is.”
Ingalls is a cousin to some of Saarinen’s more famous contemporaneous work, including the TWA Flight Center at JFK Airport in New York and Dulles Airport in Washington D.C., both of which share structural DNA with the hockey rink and were finished in 1962, the year after Saarinen’s untimely death from a brain tumor at age 51. (Yale’s Ezra Stiles and Morse residential colleges, two other polarizing campus buildings Saarinen designed, were also completed in 1962.) Today, more than six decades since it landed in New Haven more like a spaceship than an airplane, Ingalls Rink exists in its own context. Following a multimillion dollar renovation finished in 2010, it figures to be around for decades to come, which is important, because, architectural and historical significance aside, it’s just a great place for a hockey game—especially when the score is tight, every seat is filled and fans crowd the concrete concourse in nervous anticipation. “There’s something about the fluid nature of Ingalls and the speed of hockey, the almost ballet of hockey,” Goldberger says. “This [design] has such fluid horizontal power that feels right for hockey.”
Musing over the rink’s legacy, Saarinen said in that 1957 speech, “What intrigues me most is to imagine archeologists 5,000 years from now digging in New Haven and first coming across prehistoric bones in the Peabody Museum and then not so far away from there finding this huge dinosaur-like skeleton. What kind of history will they reconstruct about the formidable creatures Yale men were in the mid-20th century!”
Or, for that matter, Yale men and women in the 21st.
Written by Daniel Fleschner. Image 1 sourced from Yale. Image 2 photographed by Jake Goldman. Images 3, 4 5 and 7 photographed by Dan Mims. Image 6 photographed by Kathy Leonard Czepiel.
