Have a seat

Amir Sharif/Yale Daily News

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Aspiring architects might be asked to plan campuses or whole cities as part of their education at the School of Architecture. But sometimes, the problem is as simple as a chair. For a seminar last fall, teachers Timothy Newton ’07MArch and Joshua Rowley asked students to spend the term studying chairs and designing one as “a manageable kind of experiment in scale,” says Newton. The 12 students produced vastly different designs, such as Hilary Bingnear’s Bing Chair, Julianne August-Schmidt’s Coyote Chair, and Ann-Marie Armstrong’s Modular Terrain (above). The chairs caught the eye of judges at New York’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair (May 15–18), who included them in an exhibit of student work. Even better, the students have a start on furnishing their postgraduate apartments.