School Notes: School of Architecture
May/June 2007

Forty years of building for the community

Every year since 1967, first-year graduate students in architecture have designed and constructed a building for a community-based client. This hands-on experience has been a unique achievement in American architectural education, and has been a mirror for changes in American society over the past 40 years. A new book, The Yale Building Project: The First Forty Years, is the first comprehensive history of one of the school's most important initiatives. Written by Richard W. Hayes ’86MArch with contributions from Paul Brouard ’61MArch and Ted Whitten ’00MArch, the book represents a major archival effort to record these projects and to interview numerous YSOA alumni. Documenting each of the 40 building projects with drawings and photographs, the book also includes essays that situate the program within its historical and educational context. The Yale Building Project: The First Forty Years is published by the School of Architecture and distributed by Yale University Press.

A look at architects in prewar Europe

A book published by Yale University Press in association with the School of Architecture presents the early writings of the architect, designer, and architectural critic George Nelson (1908-1986), who was a 1928 graduate of Yale College and a 1931 graduate of the School of Fine Arts. In 1934, when Nelson was a fellow at the American Academy of Rome, he wrote a series of articles (published in Pencil Points in 1935 and 1936) about European architects and their work during that politically and artistically crucial era. Included in Building a New Europe -- Portraits of Modern Architects are 12 essays that Nelson wrote on such architects as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Giuseppe Vaccaro, the Luckhardt Brothers, and Walter Gropius, along with photographs originally published by Pencil Points. Architectural historian Kurt W. Forster, Vincent Scully Visiting Professor at Yale, contributed the introduction.