School Notes: School of Architecture
November/December 2008

Travel for advanced design studios

Students in six advanced design studios traveled the globe for a week in September to study architectural issues as varied as their locales.

One studio visited Crete and Athens to study the labyrinth and the Parthenon and to design a device for producing wind- and solar-powered energy. In Las Vegas, students learned how concepts of urban planning that incorporate mixed-use, high-density buildings, pedestrian-friendly streets, continuous street frontage, and public transportation can be applied to the Las Vegas "strip," celebrated decades ago as the latest exciting urban frontier. Students visiting an IT campus in New Delhi explored the nature of the contemporary global workplace and designed a sustainable interface for integrating "building and landscape, indoors and outdoors, natural and synthetic," as outlined in the course description.

Another class journeyed to Munich and the Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism to study the relationship of part to whole, and subject to object, through what Professor Peter Eisenman calls "modernity's darkest manifestation: the Third Reich." In Spain, students designed a public park and network of pedestrian streets, as well as a mixed-use hotel; while another group traveled to China to collaborate with architecture students and faculty at Hong Kong University and Tongji University in Shanghai to consider the character of both the historic and contemporary urban fabric in Shanghai.

Building project house dedicated

The latest home built in the Jim Vlock First-Year Building Project, a wheelchair-accessible duplex for a disabled female veteran, was dedicated on September 25. The Building Project began in 1967 and is a requirement for every architecture student at Yale. This year the students worked with Common Ground Community, a nonprofit developer, as well as the Veterans Affairs Office to build the home in a low-income New Haven neighborhood. The design incorporated sustainable materials, including cedar and bamboo, and energy-efficient materials and technology, such as a precast concrete foundation system.

Architect chosen for new Yale colleges

Yale University has chosen the architectural firm of Dean Robert A. M. Stern ’65MArch to design Yale's two new undergraduate residential colleges. The colleges will allow for the first expansion of the undergraduate population in more than 40 years, from 5,250 to about 6,000 students. They will be built north of Grove Street Cemetery, in a triangle bounded by Prospect, Canal, and Sachem streets, and are expected to open in 2013. In making the announcement, Yale president Richard Levin ’74PhD said that for the past decade, Stern "has advised me on every major building project we have undertaken. His understanding of Yale, coupled with his appreciation of how good design can foster community, will lead to a superior result." Stern says the layout of the new buildings will resemble the residential colleges designed in the 1930s by James Gamble Rogers, 1889.