The World's Most Beautiful Hockey Rink Gets a Big Upgrade

Eero Saarinen's mid-century masterpiece on Yale's campus has been sensitively restored by his protégés.
Image may contain Building and Architecture
Courtesy of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates LLC

Eero Saarinen completed the Ingalls Rink hockey stadium on Yale’s campus in 1958. It is affectionately known as the Yale Whale, because its curved roof evokes a humpback breaching the water. A critique in the December 1958 issue of Architectural Forum called it “one of the most surprising new buildings in the world,” and said the modernist architect had “shaped a structure loaded with personality.”

Courtesy of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates LLC

It needed a lot of personality. “It was important to establish an identity for it, because it was at a somewhat remote distance from campus at that time," Kevin Roche says. "[Saarinen] wanted students to gravitate towards it, and the public, too.” Roche knows this because he, like his partner, John Dinkeloo, worked in Saarinen's office in the 1950s. More recently, Roche’s firm Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo (KRJD) led the restoration and expansion of the facilities, and in leading a sensitive upgrade on the New Haven, Connecticut, campus, won a prestigious preservation award from Docomoco’s US chapter.

Any building that’s stood for 50 years will need sprucing up, but Ingalls Rink also needed to reflect the nature of college athletics. When Eero Saarinen and Associates designed Ingalls Rink, college hockey wasn't such a to-do. “Today, it’s big business,” says Wes Kavanagh, a design principal at KRJD. Because the game was more casual, the original design didn’t factor in strength and conditioning rooms or offices for coaches. Women’s hockey didn’t even exist. "I heard it said that before this building was built, just about every hockey building was a shed or a barn," Kavanagh says.

Over the decades, the Yale hockey community took to ramping up amenities by building ad hoc structures and spaces underneath the bleachers in an improvisational, favela-like style that was hardly up to code. KRJD replaced them with sprawling training facilities under the parking lot. The make-over includes locker rooms for the men’s and women’s teams, as well as a third set for the community that skates at Ingalls.

Saarinen's signature arch—which spans the length of the building—helped the renovation efforts. KRJD strung modern cables and wiring for the new lighting system and scoreboard along seams in the swooping ceiling without detracting from its wood paneling. “Every cable is a challenge,” Roche says.

Kavanagh says the restoration's beauty lies in its power to renew the Bulldogs' pride, which can only lead to more wins: “You can imagine that if you take a facility and upgrade it, and all the cracks have been filled, the walls painted, and the lighting is better than it’s ever been, that the team is inspired, too.”