Eero Saarinen designed David S. Ingalls Rink, the hockey rink Yale built between 1953 and 1958, and its unmistakable Whale profile is in front of you. Locals call it The Whale for its unmistakable profile. Imagine the project arriving at a final cost of $1.5 million—double the original estimate—so the scale you face was a major investment by the Ingalls family, the arena’s primary benefactors.
Inside and out this is an exercise in structural poetry: a 300-foot (90 m) reinforced concrete arch in the catenary form that became one of Saarinen’s signatures. From that arch a cable net is strung to support a timber roof, producing a stable double-curvature form. Exterior cables linking the arch directly to the outer roof edges were added in design development to address forces caused by asymmetry. The rink seats 3,500 people beneath a maximum ceiling height of 75 feet (23 m).
The building carries the name of David S. Ingalls, Yale class of 1920, and David S. Ingalls, Jr., Yale class of 1956—both hockey captains—and it earned recognition on the American Institute of Architects’ America’s Favorite Architecture list in 2007. A 300-foot reinforced concrete arch carries the cable net and timber roof overhead, the catenary curve that landed The Whale on America's Favorite Architecture in 2007.