School Notes: School of Architecture
May/June 2017

Urban revitalization expert is Poynter Fellow

Majora Carter, a leading urban revitalization strategy consultant, real estate developer, and award-winning broadcaster, spoke at the School of Architecture as a Poynter Fellow earlier this semester. Carter is responsible for the creation and implementation of green infrastructure projects, policies, and job training and placement systems. Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and a Peabody Award for The Promised Land, a public radio program.

Interdisciplinarity a must for student events

Students in the school’s research programs, doctor of philosophy and master of environmental design, are increasingly reaching toward interdisciplinary methods and topics in the programming of their student-organized speaker series. This semester, guests have lectured on ocular mimicry in Enlightenment theater architecture, the curvature of non-Euclidean geometries, the monstrosity of monuments, and the relation between The Man in the High Castle and Nazi-occupied Norway. This diversity of intellectual pursuit is a lead-up to next fall’s symposium marking the 50th anniversary of the founding of the master of environmental design program at Yale, one of the oldest research-based architecture programs in the country.

New Urbanism studio

Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk ’74MArch returned to Yale this semester as the Robert A. M. Stern Visiting Professor in Classical Architecture. Her advanced studio course, The Architecture of Community, focuses on New Urbanism, a movement that promotes pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods that include housing, shopping, and public spaces. The course also considers the challenge of creating mixed-income communities and the evolution of the global real estate market. Plater-Zyberk is a cofounder of the Congress of New Urbanism. In 2001 she and her husband Andres Duany were corecipients of the Vincent J. Scully Prize from the National Building Museum, named after their onetime Yale professor upon whose ideas the New Urbanism movement was built.