School Notes: School of Architecture
May/June 2010

One-of-a-kind chairs

The International Contemporary Furniture Fair at the Javits Center in Manhattan, May 15–18, will display a collection of original chairs designed and fabricated by YSOA students as part of the fall semester course, “The Chair as Crucible for Architectural Design.” Taught by Tim Newton ’07MArch and Josh Rowley, the seminar explored the chair as a model for understanding architecture from concept to choice of materials and fabrication. “As individual as their authors, the chair provides a medium that is a controllable minimum structure, ripe for material and conceptual experiments,” according to the course description. Students designed and constructed full-scale prototype chairs, which were selected for display at the Furniture Fair. (For photos of some of the chairs, see the Yale Alumni Magazine report, “Have a Seat.”)

Gallery update

The School of Architecture Gallery will show the “2010 Year-End Exhibition of Student Work” from May 21 to July 30. Previous exhibitions this year were “The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture”; “What We Learned: The Yale Las Vegas Studio and the Work of Venturi Scott Brown & Associates”; and “Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future.” The Saarinen show, which closed May 2, covered the architect’s career from the 1930s, when he was a student at Yale, through the early 1960s, when the last of his buildings was completed posthumously by colleagues Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo. A display of drawings, letters, photographs, and other materials dating from Saarinen’s years as an architecture student at Yale included a watercolor done by Saarinen while on student travels. Titled Acropolis, it was recently donated to the School of Architecture by Richard Nash Gould ’68, ’72MArch.