School Notes: School of Architecture
July/August 2010

Distinguished endowed chairs

This fall will inaugurate the Norman Foster Visiting Professorship at Yale, with the appointment of Alejandro Zaera-Polo, cofounder (with Farshid Moussavi) of the London-based firm Foreign Office Architects (FOA). Zaera-Polo has served as dean of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam and has taught at Columbia, UCLA, Princeton, and other universities around the world. FOA’s award-winning built projects include the Yokohama International Cruise Terminal in Japan; the South-East Coastal Park in Barcelona, Spain; the Highcross development anchor building in Leicester, UK; and the Meydan Retail Center in Istanbul, Turkey. Zaera-Polo will be assisted by Maider Llaguno.

Other distinguished visiting faculty this fall will be Tod Williams and Billie Tsien ’71, Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professors; Massimo Scolari, William B. and Charlotte Shepherd Davenport Visiting Professor; Brigitte Shim, Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor; Diana Balmori, William Henry Bishop Visiting Professor; Hernando Diaz Alonso, Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor; and Mario Carpo, Vincent Scully Visiting Professor in Architectural History.

Exhibition honors lighting designer

An exhibition in the Rudolph Hall Architecture Gallery will celebrate the 100th birthday of Richard Kelly ’44BArch, the Yale-trained architect who was one of the most influential lighting designers in the history of modern architecture. The Structure of Light: Richard Kelly and the Illumination of Modern Architecture will be on view August 23–October 2. During his long and productive career, Kelly designed more than 300 lighting projects. He collaborated with Mies van der Rohe on the Lake Shore Drive Apartments and the Seagram Building; with Philip Johnson on his Glass House, Four Seasons restaurant, and New York State Theater; and with Louis Kahn on the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Kimbell Art Gallery in Fort Worth, Texas. The exhibition, organized by Dietrich Neumann, professor at Brown and former Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History at Yale, will feature drawings and photographs, many from Yale’s Manuscripts and Archives, which is the repository for Kelly’s papers.

Coming events in Rudolph Hall

A number of public events have been announced for the fall term at the School of Architecture. Saarinen Visiting Professor Brigitte Shim will open this year’s lecture series with a talk on August 26. Other lectures by visiting professors will follow during the month of September. A screening of Vincent Scully: An Art Historian among Architects will take place on October 28. The film is produced by the Checkerboard Film Foundation. On November 4, Norman Foster Visiting Professor Alejandro Zaera-Polo will give a talk titled “Envelopes,” as part of the school’s open house for prospective students. More details on these events may be found at the school’s website.