School Notes: School of Architecture
March/April 2011

Dean awarded highest honor for traditional architecture

Dean Robert A. M. Stern ’65MArch, whose designs have been credited with revitalizing traditional architecture, has been named the 2011 recipient of the Richard H. Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture. He will be honored on March 26 at a ceremony in Chicago. Established in 2003 through the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, the Driehaus Prize honors the best practitioners of traditional, classical, and sustainable architecture and urbanism in the modern world. It is the most significant award honoring classicism in the contemporary built environment and comes with a $200,000 prize, which the dean will donate to Yale.

Dean Stern is founder and senior partner of Robert A. M. Stern Architects, whose completed projects include the Greenberg Conference Center at Yale, the Comcast Center in Philadelphia, and the residential tower at 15 Central Park West in Manhattan. Current projects include the design of the George W. Bush Presidential Center at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and two new undergraduate residential colleges in the neo-Gothic style for Yale. A Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, Dean Stern received the AIA New York chapter’s Medal of Honor in 1984 and the chapter’s President’s Award in 2001. Among his other honors are the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Medal from the Municipal Art Society of New York in 2009 and the Vincent Scully Prize from the National Building Museum in 2008.

Yale acquires Gwathmey archives

The archives of Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects have been donated to Yale by Bette-Ann Gwathmey, widow of the firm’s founding partner, Charles Gwathmey ’62MArch, who died in 2009. The donated materials include architectural drawings, photographs, sketches, and correspondence from about 175 projects. The collection will reside in Sterling Memorial Library’s Department of Manuscripts and Archives. Among the projects documented is the award-winning Yale Arts Complex, which includes the renovations to Paul Rudolph Hall and the designs for the Jeffrey H. Loria Center for the History of Art and the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library. Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects, founded by Gwathmey and Robert Siegel in New York in 1968, has designed a wide range of built residential, commercial, and institutional projects, including libraries, hospitals, hotels, museums, apartments, and office buildings.

Distinguished lectures

Thomas Y. Levin, professor of German at Princeton University and an authority on the philosophy and politics of surveillance, will present the David W. Roth and Robert H. Symonds Memorial Lecture on March 24. His talk, “Topographies of Elusion,” is the keynote address for the student-organized symposium “Fugitive Geographies,” which takes place March 24 and 25. Later this spring, adman Peter Arnell will deliver the Eero Saarinen Lecture, titled “Creating Desire and Appeal in the Age of Branding” (March 28); Peter Eisenman, the Charles Gwathmey Professor in Practice, will present “Wither Architecture: Architecture vs. Design” (April 7); and John Patkau, the Lord Norman R. Foster Visiting Professor in Architecture, will speak on “Buildings/Projects/Competitions: 2009–2011” (April 14). All lectures are open to the public.