School Notes: School of Architecture
September/October 2014

Urban Design Workshop helping to create peace park

Yale architects are helping design the first-ever “peace park” in the Middle East, on a 2,000-acre parcel of land that borders both Israel and Jordan. When completed, gates on both sides of the border will welcome visitors to the park. The project was launched in 2006 by EcoPeace/Friends of the Earth Middle East, which invited the Yale School of Architecture and Israel’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design to help plan the site. In May, the Yale Urban Design Workshop, directed by Professor Alan Plattus ’76 and critic Andrei Harwell ’06MArch, held a three-day workshop at Kibbutz Gesher in Israel to discuss proposals to develop the southern entrance to the proposed park. The property, at the confluence of the Jordan and Yarmouk Rivers, has three bridges, a fourteenth-century inn, a Bauhaus-style railroad station built in the 1930s, and other features of historic and ecological interest. Since the region is fraught with political tension, Plattus says, “The challenge for a designer is to come up with a framework for such a park that is open and welcomes different interpretations, rather than closed and fixed on a singular story or singular interpretation.” The plans are currently moving forward on both sides of the river in a parallel fashion.

Urbanism in the Great Lakes region

An exhibition at the school’s Rudolph Hall gallery features a field of suspended, illuminated panels and large-scale models that show recent research and speculative design work by the architectural practice RVTR of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Toronto, Ontario. The panels contain drawings of design proposals, historical information, maps, photographs, and text that together present a study of the Great Lakes region in light of new modes of transportation, renewable energy, and urban growth. Set within this context of transformation, the exhibition projects possible urban and architectural futures that envision new public domains. Infra Eco Logi Urbanism is on view through November 20. For more information, go to www.rvtr.com/exhibitions/infra-eco-logi-urbanism.