School Notes: School of Architecture
May/June 2009

School mourns loss of retired faculty member

Architect and retired faculty member Peter Millard ’51BArch died March 30 at Connecticut Hospice. He was 84. Millard was born in New York City and studied architecture at Dartmouth College before attending the Yale School of Architecture. He served during World War II as a naval aviator, and after the war practiced architecture in New Haven; he also taught architectural design at the school for 40 years. As a partner with the firm Earl P. Carlin, Architects, he was responsible for the design of two award-winning firehouses in New Haven -- one of which prompted Robert A. M. Stern ’65MArch, then a Millard student and now dean of the school, to write that it "points to a new direction in American architecture -- one which . . . marks a return to architecture that is monumental and urban and public, in the best sense of the word." Millard is survived by his wife, two children, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Memorial gifts for scholarships may be sent to the school at P.O. Box 208242, New Haven, CT 06520-8242.

Funds for green architecture

The School of Architecture has chosen five projects to receive the inaugural grants from the Hines Research Fund for Advanced Sustainability in Architecture. While most grants for architectural research are for finite individual projects, the School of Architecture has taken a broader view, selecting projects that explore the connections among academic disciplines to further architectural development. The $5 million endowment fund was created in 2008 by Gerald D. Hines, founder and chairman of Hines, an international real estate firm; he was the first Edward P. Bass Distinguished Visiting Architecture Fellow at the school.

The five winning proposals focus on construction methods and materials and optimizing energy use in buildings. The principal investigators for each are Keith Krumwiede, Kyoung Sun Moon, Michelle Addington, Hilary Sample, and Susan Farricielli.

Robotic arm aids students in precision work

In 2006 the school bought a robotic arm called the Kuka HA 60-3, which architecture students can use to build models for their final projects. The $150,000 purchase, made possible by a gift from an anonymous donor, has helped to make the school a leader among architecture schools in design fabrication. "Robots were originally designed to do simple, repetitive tasks," says John Eberhart ’98MArch, the school's director of digital media and an instructor in digital media and fabrication. "The big development here is the ability to generate a program to mill out a three-dimensional model that the robot would be able to recognize. The company we bought it from was able to take two different technologies so the software could 'speak' to the robot," enabling it to perform highly complex tasks. Eberhart teaches students to use the arm as part of a required course, and it has been used consistently over the past couple of years. It was the only one of its kind in a university setting until six months ago, when Harvard acquired one. Eberhart says, "Students were going to open houses at both schools and saying, 'Yale has a robot. Where's Harvard's?'"