This weekend I entertained a business guest from England. The weather wasn’t great, so Jen and I took him to the Yale Art Museum and the Yale Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library.
The Art Museum was awesome. Renovations were just recently completed, and as a free art museum this one might be the best I’ve visited. In an hour we couldn’t walk through the museum in its entirety. In addition to having a noteworthy collection of compositions from art masters, the museum impressed me in the breadth of its exhibits: Sculptures, Ritualistic art, and even Coins.
But it was the unexpected Beinecke Library that impressed me most. We stopped by mostly on a whim. The library houses rare books and manuscripts, but since the books are rare – you can’t stroll through the book shelves – instead there are a few key pieces in protective cases placed around the center of the excitement: the vault of books.
Five stories high and encased in glass, the vault is awesome to behold. Making the experience all the more eerie, the walls are plates of marble. The plates are so thin that light from outside shines through them. Unfortunately for us, it was cloudy. Still an impressive sight.
If you have some time in the New Haven area, I strongly recommend visiting these two Yale locales.
The exterior reminds me of the Pirelli Building (IKEA New Haven’s storage)
When I went to wikipedia to see if it was also a Marcel Breuer, I learned that those piers/pylons it’s on create an optical illusion when it’s sunny out
[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/67/Yale-beinecke-library.jpg/300px-Yale-beinecke-library.jpg[/img]
Nice research!
And you’re right, it looks a lot like the Pirelli Building. In fact, CT seems to have an overabundance of lofted buildings. There’s the Hartford Stilts building as well – though it doesn’t have the same stone feel as these other two.