School Notes: School of Architecture
September/October 2012

Yale at the Venice Biennale

Dean Robert A. M. Stern is chair of the international jury for this year’s Venice Biennale, which began August 29 and continues through November 25. Also at the Biennale, Peter Eisenman, the Charles Gwathmey Professor in Practice at Yale, and his seminar students are exhibiting a project based on work by eighteenth-century engraver, mapmaker, and architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi. With access to Piranesi’s original folio of six etchings, housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Eisenman’s students “reinvented” Rome as a gilded 3-D–printed model—the first representation of Piranesi’s fanciful, time-bending rendition of the Eternal City. The model, accompanied by explanatory text, is on display in the Biennale’s Central Pavilion.

Symposium on architecture and sound

Architecture can create silent places and eddies of noise, deeply affecting how people experience the built environment and facilitating or frustrating communication. Recently developed design tools help architects shape the soundscapes of their buildings, and new audio technologies afford access to previously undetected sonic environments. The J. Irwin Miller Symposium, “The Sound of Architecture,” October 4–6, will bring together architects, acoustical engineers, composers, and artists, as well as scholars in archaeology, media studies, musicology, philosophy, and the history of technology, to explore architecture as an auditory environment.

Panel discusses Eisenman Collection

The Peter Eisenman Collection at Yale consists of over 2,500 items covering the development of modernist aesthetics in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century, including rare art and architecture publications, manifestos, original prints, signed and dedicated journals, and handwritten letters from such architects and artists as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. In conjunction with a fall exhibition at the Beinecke Library, Eisenman and colleagues from CUNY, NYU, and MIT will participate in a panel discussion, “The Eisenman Collection: An Analysis,” at YSoA November 1.