School Notes: School of Architecture
July/August 2016

British Art Center’s conservation project led by alumnus

The Yale Center for British Art, designed by Louis I. Kahn to house Paul Mellon’s extraordinary gift to the university, reopened in May after completing a multi-year conservation project headed by Knight Architecture, LLC—the firm of George Knight ’95MArch. This was the most complex building conservation initiative undertaken at the YCBA to date, comprising the entire structure from roof to basement. It renewed the public galleries, internal systems, spaces, and amenities, and provided an opportunity to reimagine and reinstall the center’s collections of more than five centuries of British art—the largest outside of the United Kingdom.

Student exhibits at design fair

International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) in New York City selected Isaac Southard ’16MArch to exhibit a chair he designed and fabricated at Yale as part of The Chair course, taught by Timothy Newton ’07MArch. The ICFF Studio is a juried competition at which young designers showcase their prototypes to manufacturers, retailers, and the media. 

Architecture League honors

NEMESTUDIO, founded by Neyran Turan ’03MEvD and Mete Sonmez, was awarded a 2016 Architectural League Prize. The theme for this year’s competition, “(im)permanence,” focused on how time affects architecture, altering expectations of permanent structures in an impermanent environment. The six prizewinners gave public lectures in June and their work is being exhibited at the New School’s Parsons School of Design through July 30.

Turan, assistant professor of architecture at the University of California-Berkeley, is an architect and partner at NEMESTUDIO in San Francisco. Her design work, ranging from installations to buildings and landscapes, has been exhibited at the Chicago Architecture Biennial and SALT in Istanbul and will be included in the 2016 Istanbul Design Biennial. Her work draws on the relationship between geography and design. She is the editor-in-chief of the journal New Geographies 0 (2008) and New Geographies: After Zero (2009), and holds a doctorate of design from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.