Constructs Fall 2023

Constructs Yale Architecture

Fall 2023

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Constructs

Contents 4 5 6

Fall ’23 Events Dean’s Letter Conversations 6 7 8

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School News 10 14 14 16 18 19 19 20 20 21 22 24 26 27

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Marina Tabassum and Vyjayanthi Rao Jordan H. Carver and AJ Artemel Chat Travieso and Keller Easterling

Excerpts from Denise Scott Brown: A Symposium Building Project Update François Dallegret: Beyond the Bubble 2023 by Anny Li and Willis Kingery Turner Brooks: A Celebration News from the Yale Center for Ecosystems in Architecture Review of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale by Joshua Tan and Timothy Wong News from the Yale Urban Design Workshop Post-Professional Independent Design Research Studio Spring 2023 North Gallery Student Exhibitions YSoA Books 2022–23 Spring 2023 Events Spring 2023 Studios Faculty News The 2023 Pritzker Prize Ceremony in Athens by Aristotelis Dimitrakopoulos

Alumni News 28 28 29 31

Alumni News Review of Norman Foster at the Centre Pompidou by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen Review of Vkhutemas: Laboratory of Modernism 1920–1930 at the Cooper Union by Violette de la Selle Carl Abbott on Architectural Travel

Colophon Constructs To form by putting together parts; build; frame; devise. A complex image or idea resulting from synthesis by the mind.

Constructs is published twice a year by the dean’s office of the Yale School of Architecture.

Nadine Koobatian Bimal Mendis (BA ’98, MArch ’02) Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen (MED ’94) Editor Ali John Pierre Artemel (MArch ’14)

Back Cover Concrete Plant in Easton, Pennsylvania, Turner Brooks, charcoal drawing.

We would like to acknowledge the support of the Thomas Rutherford Trowbridge Fund; the Paul Rudolph Publication Fund; the Dean Robert A.M. Stern Fund; the Robert A.M. Stern Family Foundation for Advancement of Architectural Culture Fund; and the Nitkin Family Dean’s Discretionary Fund in Architecture.

Email constructs@yale.edu

Dean Deborah Berke, J.M. Hoppin Professor

Website: www.architecture.yale.edu/publications/ constructs (for back issues)

Associate Deans Sunil Bald Phillip G. Bernstein (BA ’79, MArch ’83) Assistant Deans

Volume 25, Number 1 Cover Khudi Bari, Marina Tabassum Architects: Photograph by City Syntax.

Fall 2023

Associate Editor Cathryn Drake Assistant Editor Benjamin Piascik Graphic Design Manuel Miranda Practice Typeface HG Grotesk by Berton Hasebe

Photographers AJ Artemel Sangji Han (MArch ’23) Tong Tom Hsu (MArch ’24) Benjamin Piascik With special thanks to Emma Brown, Israt, Douglas Gillespie, Frida Grahn, Marc Guberman, Nina Rappaport, and Sojin Shin. © Copyright 2023 Yale School of Architecture PO Box 208242 New Haven, CT 06520

Printing GHP Media

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Fall ’23 Events Lectures All lectures take place at 6:30 p.m. in Hastings Hall, basement level of Paul Rudolph Hall, unless otherwise noted.

Thursday, August 24

Thursday, November 9

Alberto Kalach and Nona Yehia: Carlos Zedillo Vasco: Recent Work Harvesting Growth: Cultivating Community through the Thursday, August 31 Hybrid Urban Factory Jordan H. Carver: Leviathan’s Scaffolding

Keynote lecture for the Hybrid Urban Factory Symposium

Thursday, September 7

Thursday, November 16

Marina Tabassum: The Work of Marina Tabassum Architects

Joan Ockman: Toward a Political Ecology of Architecture

Thursday, September 21

Mark Lamster: The Flattening: Why Everything Looks Like Everything Else (and What to do About it) Brendan Gill Memorial Lecture

Thursday, October 5

Chat Travieso: 101 Ways to Subvert a Wall, and Other Stories Brendan Gill Memorial Lecture

Monday, October 23

Sir Isaac Julien in conversation with Esther da Costa Meyer and Sunil Bald: Lina Bo Bardi— A Marvellous Entanglement Cosponsored by the Yale Center for British Art

Thursday, October 26

Paolo Tombesi: Sails, Octopuses, and Beds: The Sydney Opera House Turns 50 Gordon H. Smith Lecture

Thursday, November 2

Ana María Durán Calisto: Dien Dien and the Civilized Agroecological Forests of Amazonia

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George Morris Woodruff, Class of 1857, Memorial Lecture

Symposium November 9–10

Hybrid Urban Factory Now that industry is often clean, green, small, and quiet, it can be integrated with other uses at the city and building scale.

This potential hybrid is as of yet very little explored. What will this new mix look like and how can it encourage new entrepreneurs, jobs, and urban forms? How can hybrid models change with new technologies, sustainable manufacturing, and advanced production systems to be integrated into communities with local entrepreneurs at the helm? Can we break the planning and land-use patterns of segregated zoning by class and function to encourage mixeduse zoning? This symposium on the Hybrid Urban Factory, convened by Nina Rappaport,

will explore these issues through a series of case studies, workshops, and design-driven discussions on policy and making things.

The symposium will convene on Thursday evening with a keynote talk and on Friday it will be divided into two main sessions: Remixing Spaces for Production and Remixing Factories for Community.

Designers and entrepreneurs from the U.S. and Europe will present projects and local policies that reimagine and encourage urban manufacturing in new spaces and for jobs that also support social and economic equity.

Hybrid Urban Factory is supported in part by the J. Irwin Miller Endowment.

Exhibition August 24–December 10

Lina Bo Bardi — A Marvellous Entanglement The Yale Center for British Art and the Yale School of Architecture partner to present an immersive multiscreen film installation by the British artist and filmmaker Sir Isaac Julien.

Lina Bo Bardi — A Marvellous Entanglement (2019) offers a poetic reflection on the life, work, and legacy of the visionary Modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi. A leading figure of postwar Latin American Modernism, Bo Bardi designed some of Brazil’s most iconic art institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia, the São Paulo Museum of Art, the SESC Pompéia, and the Teatro Oficina. By combining excerpts from her writings with footage of these landmarks, Julien’s moving tribute to the architect intertwines Bo Bardi’s personal history with the buildings she created and the cultural fabric in which they are embedded.

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In this new presentation envisioned for the Yale Architecture Gallery, Bo Bardi’s designs find resonance with Rudolph Hall and other Modernist buildings on Yale’s campus. This is the first time that the film will be shown in a school of architecture, a particularly apt location given Bo Bardi’s role as a teacher of architecture and urbanism at the University of São Paulo.

The Yale School of Architecture’s exhibition program is supported in part by the Robert A.M. Stern Fund, the Pickard Chilton Dean’s Resource Fund, the Nitkin Family Dean’s Discretionary Fund in Architecture, the Fred Koetter Exhibitions Fund, the Kibel Foundation Fund, and the James Wilder Green Dean’s Resource Fund.

Dean’s Letter YSoA’s 2023 Commencement Ceremony in the Weir Court. Photograph by AJ Artemel.

As the 2023–24 academic year begins I am thankful for the ongoing, generous support of our alumni and friends. The many alumni events this past spring—such as the meeting of Yale/City and Yale Women in Architecture, the Class of 2013 reunion, the alumni gathering in Berlin, and a reception at the AIA Conference on Architecture in San Francisco—show just how involved and enthusiastic our community is about architectural education.

New scholarships, including those in honor of Doreen Adengo (MArch ’05), Barbara DeGrange Kieran (BA ’73), Steven Harris and Lucien Rees-Roberts, Bryan Fuermann, Ma Yansong (March ’02), and Francis Kéré, as well as a gift to augment the Billie Tsien (BA ’71) Scholarship, have advanced our progress toward the goal of providing a debt-free path into the architecture profession.

The fall advanced studio faculty includes Alan Organschi (MArch ’88); Alan Plattus (BA ’76); Carlos Zedillo (BA ’06, MArch ’10), Edward P. Bass Distinguished Visiting Architecture Fellow, teaching with Alberto Kalach; Kim Holden, William Henry Bishop Visiting Professor; Dan Wood, William B. and Charlotte Shepherd Davenport Visiting Professor; Marina Tabassum, Norman R. Foster Visiting Professor; Sandra Barclay and Jean Pierre Crousse, Charles Gwathmey Professors in Practice; Billie Tsien and Azadeh Rashidi, Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professors; Chat Travieso (MArch ’10), Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor; and Mark Foster Gage (MArch ’01).

Students eat together on the roof, April 24, 2023.

Photograph by Tom Hsu. After the success of last year’s singlesemester design research studio, post-professional students will now take a two-semester independent design research studio in their final year, led by Bimal Mendis (BA ’98, MArch ’02).

Fall 2023

Our events agenda features many distinguished speakers, including Ai Weiwei, KPF Visiting Scholar Jordan H. Carver, Sir Isaac Julien, Alberto Kalach, Esther da Costa Meyer (PhD ’87), Joan Ockman, and Paolo Tombesi. A new events series, “YSoA Works,” shines the spotlight on faculty achievements, whether books, buildings, or exhibitions. This semester’s symposium is “Hybrid Urban Factory,” a policy-oriented workshop fueled by case studies in urban manufacturing, led by Nina Rappaport.

This past semester the Jim Vlock First Year Building Project took on a new client, Friends Center for Children, and has started construction on the first of four structures of a Fair Haven Heights campus for the early childhood education center.

We also celebrated the 40-year teaching career of Turner Brooks (BA ’65, MArch ’70) and the legacy of Denise Scott Brown.

This issue of Constructs is the first Sang Ji Han (MArch ’23) poses on the penthouse balcony edited by AJ Artemel after commencement. Photograph by Benjamin Piascik.

(MArch ’14), a graduate of the school who has worked as director of communications for more than six years. He was an editor of Perspecta 49 (2016) and has written for Metropolis, Fast Company, Gizmodo, Architect’s Newspaper, and New York Review of Architecture, among other publications. He plans to launch a monthly digital edition of Constructs this fall, so keep an eye on your inbox.

Deborah Berke FAIA LEED AP Dean and J.M. Hoppin Professor

Drawing shoes with Turner Brooks on April 22. Photograph by Benjamin Piascik.

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Conversations Marina Tabassum and Vyjayanthi Rao Marina Tabassum, Norman R. Foster Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Architecture and founder of the Dhaka-based practice Marina Tabassum Architects, talks to anthropologist, writer and curator Vyjayanthi Rao, Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Architecture, about the social reach of architecture.

Bait Ur Rouf Mosque, Dhaka, 2012, Marina Tabassum Architects. Photograph by City Syntax.

Khudi Bari housing, 2021, Marina Tabassum Architects. Photograph by Asif Salman.

contemporary: it requires fewer footings and therefore less foundation. You can just take it down anytime you want. It can be easily assembled and disassembled. It can withstand lateral wind loads. If you consider the global context, the residents have zero to very low income. Yet they also have a right to good design, a good way of living, a good environment. Quite often I talk about moving away from industrial products. But if you use them in the right way… The reason we use corrugated sheets is because they are easy to disassemble and reuse. They require less maintenance and are sturdy and durable. When you are dealing with cyclones and thunderstorms and flooding, you need materials that are stable and solid. I try to use natural materials as much as possible, but I don’t mind using others when necessary.

VR There are two points you touched on that bring your methodology into focus: sourcing locally and designing projects that rely on the labor of the people who are going to live there. What is the importance of this way of working?

MT I think it’s one of the most important parts. As I said, we want this to become common knowledge. It’s about working and designing with local people to come up with ideas together. Right now we are building in the northern part of Bangladesh, near the Teesta River. We get flash flooding from India during the monsoon season, and all of a sudden your house may be completely inundated overnight. Khudi Bari has two levels, so residents can go to the upper level to escape floodwaters. We took the idea to the community—we made brochures, videos, and films— and asked, “What are the possibilities?” Then a few people volunteered and they chose one to be the guinea pig: “Okay, make a house for that person.” So that’s how we started. We build a house and everybody comes together to take part in the process. They also have their own ideas. “Maybe let’s use something instead of bamboo for the floor. We want a wooden floor.” Then once we build the first house together, everybody sees it and understands the benefits. We cannot build an entire village, so the community decides they would like to build ten houses, for example.

They meet and decide who among them is most in need of shelter. We build the roof and the basic structure, and the facade is generally made by the homeowner to promote a sense of ownership.

VR The Khudi Bari model is extremely economical, as I understand it. Is it true that you experimented to bring the costs down?

MT Yes, I think a house costs us about $450 because the price of steel is constantly rising. When we started in 2020, it was $250 for the initial cost of construction.

VR The last 20 to 25 years have seen dramatic changes throughout South Asia, particularly in the urban areas, and the commercialization of architecture is rampant. Most projects probably don’t even have architects involved. They may draw some lines on the paper, but that’s about it. But your work demonstrates that this issue of scalability, which is essential in such a populous part of the world, can be tackled effectively outside of this market logic. What is your experience of bringing these forms of experimentation back

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Vyjayanthi Rao One thing we discussed at the Lisbon Triennial is how you consciously choose to root yourself within a particular cultural, political, and climatic context. Not so long ago, the study of societies outside the West was considered a specialized endeavor, left mainly to anthropologists.

But at this moment of great planetary crisis, we are turning to the building practices of various groups that were not part of the canonical study and practice of architecture — whether Indigenous populations or peoples of the Indian subcontinent — to find solutions. The study of local materials and building practices, once labeled vernacular architecture has gained a lot of currency as having something valuable to teach all of us, wherever we may live. It is a fascinating reversal. Perhaps we could explore what this idea of the vernacular, of the ordinary, can teach us on a global scale. Can it reverse our thought processes to focus on the knowledge that comes from practical and local experience?

Marina Tabassum I have chosen to root myself in Bangladesh, where I was born and brought up. The culture, the context, and the climate are ingrained in my DNA. So when I draw a line on the south side, which would probably become a wall, I immediately feel suffocated. The moment I draw a window on my plan I can almost feel the breeze coming through that space. Since I understand the place and the context so well, I think the best way I can use my ability, my skill as an architect, would be in this very location.

That’s why, despite all the different challenges, this is where I have chosen to build and practice. And I think it’s true that in the last decade or so the West is looking more and more toward the East, trying to seek out different practices. In many ways we are looking into the tangible and intangible knowledge of so-called vernacular architecture. I remember reading somewhere that the term vernacular architecture was an attempt to put distance between what people built or was built by the master builders and what architects were seeking to create as a profession. As products of Western education, we were conditioned in the same way. But through some of the projects that took me to the countryside, I realized that there is so much wisdom in the building tradition, especially in the villages. Design is always a response to the climate, and it’s always evolving. It’s a

process that takes into account the local culture and challenges of the time; it’s an evolutionary process. What I find very interesting is that it’s a very communal and social way of living. Nobody is trying to distinguish themselves with a red building or a glass building. Everybody has a homogeneous way of living in common: the same kinds of material, same kinds of building, same kinds of technique.

VR So it’s a building process that is being refined continuously.

MT And through that refinement comes this homogeneity and very strong value of communal living, and this is something we can still use as a value in our lives and in our architecture practice.

VR Absolutely. The point you make about not seeing these as fossilized traditions is so important. For example, your design for Khudi Bari (2020): just this morning I saw your Instagram post about how the houses withstood the recent cyclone. As you say, the culture is not static; it’s a product of its time. So if tin sheets are available now, they become part of the vernacular. Do you want to elaborate on that?

MT This project came about during the pandemic. It was a response to that time and to some studies in the coastal areas of Bangladesh that we had completed just before. These are places where people live in the sand beds, moving on from one to another because they’ve lost land to riverbank erosion. This phenomenon has become much more pronounced because of the glacial melt in the Himalayas, along with heavy rainfall. These people create zero carbon footprint but are impacted directly by the climate crisis. So while we were sitting in the office during the pandemic — work was slow—we asked, “Can we come up with an intervention into the vernacular to address this?” You cannot give millions and millions of people homes and shelters.

It’s just not possible. It’s not an architect’s job either. What we can do is try to make an intervention around shared knowledge.

If people accept it, it will become common knowledge, it will become a practice, and it will be integrated into the whole system of vernacular construction. So we gave it a try. We’ve used bamboo, which is a local material, but we didn’t just make a regular bamboo structure —we tried to make it very architectural. The structure is very

into dense urban centers such as Dhaka?

MT It is immensely complex. Dhaka is a megacity of 22 million people or more, and one of the densest metropolises in the world. The main crisis with Dhaka is that it is Bangladesh: anything you need in life — jobs, education, health care — is centered around a single city, which has created an immense pressure on the city itself.

Nobody owns it, in the sense that it’s just about profit-making and investment, so there is a very transactional relationship between the city and the people. It’s quite obvious during holidays, when the entire city is almost empty. Everybody has gone home, and those who do not have a place in the countryside quite often go to Singapore or Bangkok. Because of this market-driven situation Dhaka has been taken over completely by real estate development. It caters to 1 percent of the population, so you see a lot of empty apartments and office buildings, like in many cities, while an invisible 90 percent are in need of space to live. They either live in slums or in a single apartment occupied by three or four families. If there is anything to be done in the city, it’s about planning and policymaking. It is about addressing the people who are not being addressed.

My experience of working in the city has been mostly with public projects. I quite often try to focus on interstitial spaces, the gray areas of the city. My projects have been located more often on the outskirts rather than in the city center. I find transitional spaces or places going through transformation far more interesting. When I create something it’s always about bringing some sort of order, about creating a refuge for people within a very loud, chaotic atmosphere.

VR That brings me to what is probably your most famous project, Bait Ur Rouf Mosque (2012), which has these characteristics. I’m wondering how has it influenced the surrounding neighborhood since its construction?

MT It’s interesting. I envisioned that the whole city would start to grow around it, and it has sort of happened. You can still see the mosque from this corner and that corner, and the plot in front is still not built up. But the rest of it has filled in. What has happened is that some tiny spaces I left, like a triangular entryway and the ground all along the building, have become the only public spaces in the area, and people really use them.

Children play there, women sit on the steps and chat, and at times it becomes the men’s area. That’s the only space they can occupy.

It’s sad that in a city where there is so much demand for these kinds of public spaces there is not a single empty space left for inhabitants to use. These are the same people who live by communal social values when they return to the countryside for the holidays. So the mosque gives them the only space to gather in the city.

VR How does this compare with your Independence Monument (1997), which was a major public intervention into the landscape of Dhaka and Bangladesh? What qualities do the projects share, even though they were realized at such different points in your career?

MT The monument needed a grand space, so the roof of the museum became

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On designing new vernaculars.

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On teaching and the impossibility of sovereignty.

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On subverting objects of exclusion.

You cannot give millions and millions of people homes and shelters. It’s just not possible. It’s not any single architect’s job either. What we can do is try to make an intervention around shared knowledge. If people accept it, it will become common knowledge, it will become a practice, and it will be integrated into the whole system of vernacular construction.

Museum of Independence, Dhaka, 1997, Marina Tabassum Architects. Photograph by City Syntax.

a plaza for bringing people together during the Independence Day celebration and other public events. Bangladesh experienced a lot of sacrifice and sadness during the nine-month war, in 1971, when many lives were lost. That sadness is expressed in the museum below grade, taken into the ground. Since it’s placed in the park we went for a nonbuilding approach and transformed the roof into a rare open space. The commonality between the two projects is that they bring people together to celebrate and commemorate.

VR You started to talk about how Bangladesh, as the youngest independent nation in the subcontinent, has a slightly different trajectory in its architectural history.

You pointed out a growing movement among younger architects to engage more with communities and the people they build with and for. In a sense this is akin to the methods anthropologists use, which is to say we are learning from, we’re not here to impose, and we are creating a kind of a common knowledge that is shared. It would be interesting to hear a little bit about those sorts of movements, which seem to have more momentum in Bangladesh than elsewhere in the subcontinent. Bangladesh is fascinating because it is a country that starts with this very grand architectural tradition—such as the Parliament complex

by Louis Kahn and Muzharul Islam (MArch ’61) — and now it’s at the vanguard of architecture as a cultural practice. How do you see a national architecture culture developing between these two tendencies?

MT It’s quite fascinating how younger generations of architects are leading community projects. In Bangladesh some of the schools, specifically BRAC University, send students to a village for a semester.

The students are from the cities and often have spent their formative years living a sort of cushioned life. I think working in the villages gives them a new sensibility that stays with them. Then when they graduate they may not go into an office but return to the villages and embed themselves where they work. You cannot do this kind of architecture if you’re not rooted at the site.

It’s particularly unique here in the sense that we host one million refugees, and there are many architects who work in refugee camps through various humanitarian agencies, as well as independently. There are a lot of challenges: materials, politics, the tension between the government and the aid agencies. And you have to build very quickly because it’s a humanitarian crisis — an emergency situation. Yet within that short period of time, with all the different challenges and restrictions, they create uniquely beautiful architecture. They are there working with the people, but they are not compromising on the aspect of design.

It also comes back to the question of Kahn and his presence. I have been fascinated

by Kahn’s work, his use of light, his spaces.

I don’t think anyone who has studied architecture in Bangladesh can claim that they haven’t been moved by the spaces Kahn has built. Even if you create architecture in a refugee camp, you do not forget these values. So I wouldn’t say that these are two different things; there’s a certain kind of symmetry between the two.

Fall 2023

VR That’s beautiful. In the South Asian context you see a lot of so-called slums and really degraded forms of housing. You also see the refugee camps, which of course have very different legal and policy logics. But in some formal ways they look similar. I know you’ve been engaged in the spectrum of rethinking shelter for those populations. What lessons have come from working in these mobile environments, on the one hand, and in the camps, which have many more external constraints imposed on them, on the other?

MT We talk about that quite a lot. The thing is, when we work in the Ganges Delta or even in the slums, situations can be even worse than in a refugee camp because there you have humanitarian agencies and an enormous amount of people actually catering to needs. They’re definitely living in tiny little huts or small shelters, but there are roads and there is a water system. Their issues are more about the experience of trauma and this indefinite transitory state in which they are living. Yet in terms of physical structure there is much more than what you see in the slums, where nobody looks after them and they don’t get any aid. They don’t have any fuel to cook with, sanitation is their responsibility, water supply is their responsibility, and even electricity is their responsibility. So the situation in slums is much more about physical challenges. But we work with the community in both cases. When we are working with slum-dwellers there is much more hope. They want their houses to be just so, with certain colors. In the refugee camp they just want a safe space to sleep.

VR You bring so much thought to the architecture by actually engaging with what exactly it is that people need. What is your experience of teaching in the West?

I’m curious about how you see the advanced design studio pedagogy and its value based on your experience in Asia. How do you bring the two worlds together, and where might that lead us?

MT I’ve been teaching for quite some time now. How I’ve thought about it is: What can I bring from Bangladesh to teaching in North America, or even in Europe? What can I bring that others would not be able to? In most cases what I found is that architecture is expanding its horizons. Quite often we don’t see the issue of marginalization and displacement. The studio I taught at Toronto was about displacement. There is so much movement that’s going on, be it people moving for opportunity or victims of conflict seeking safety. How do you design for transition? I call this the “architecture of transition” because more and more people live in indefinite transitory states. Where does planning strategy come in? How do you design for an emergency situation? I still teach a housing studio at TU Delft that addresses issues of marginalization and slums, and how this invisible population can be given adequate housing, not just through design but also at the policy level. I taught a studio at Harvard GSD on a $2,000 home project.

At the time we were working on a resort in the Ganges Delta. There was a group of women who were saving to build houses, and their budget was $2,000. This was a collaborative process where the students went to the site and engaged with the community. They talked to them and designed

the houses based on the discussions, and every single dollar had to be accounted for.

I think they understood the value of money from the process.

VR Wonderful. I will be interested to see the brief for your studio at Yale this Fall.

MT We didn’t talk about anthropology, but the fact is that before we work with communities we quite often go in with certain expectations. But then we work there and see that it’s not what we had anticipated. It is so important for architects to have an understanding of the methodology used by anthropologists in their work, with the notion of respect, of just being there to understand.

VR I’m glad you brought that up, and it’s been embedded throughout this conversation.

This is something that an NGO or a policymaker will not necessarily understand because they may not be thinking in relational terms.

In your current work there is an emphasis on different kinds of displaced populations

and their needs, including climate and political refugees but also tourists who are a sort of voluntarily displaced population and who wield a lot of economic power in our world today. I was thinking about your Panigram Eco Resort and Spa (2018), located in the largest mangrove forest in the world. It manages to navigate this complex ecology as well as the needs of the local people while still being open to guests. So this resort project, the mosque, and the refugee camps all demonstrate a methodology of listening. This is how you learn about issues of displacement, how things are evolving and changing, and what relations are in play. In that sense you are already doing anthropology.

MT Good to know. Thank you. But it did not happen easily. We learned through trial and error.

VR Knowledge creation is a slow and painful process.

Jordan H. Carver and AJ Artemel AJ Artemel (MArch ’14), director of communications at the Yale School of Architecture and a member of Citygroup, spoke to writer, educator, and designer Jordan H. Carver, currently the KPF Visiting Scholar and critic at the Yale School of Architecture, about the importance of rendering the spaces of disappearance visible.

AJ Artemel You’ve done a lot of investigation into black sites employed in the “War on Terror,” published in your book Spaces of Disappearance: The Architecture of Extraordinary Rendition (2018). How did you get into that line of research?

Jordan H. Carver It came from being shocked by the spectacle and politics of the United States opening secret prisons around the world and torturing people in them. Once I dug into reports from the media and human-rights organizations I developed a more comprehensive understanding of it.

There was a spatial strategy to shipping prisoners around the world, so the initial idea was to understand the interrogation and torture of suspected terrorists as a form of spatial organization. But there is also a larger question of state sovereignty and how the United States formulated its authority across the world, not just in Guantanamo Bay or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but also in places like Syria and Egypt and Israel, and in international waters. What is state sovereignty and how is it produced? And what spaces are produced to establish claims of sovereignty? The other goal was to draw it — to make it visible — because these sites were black: they were rendered invisible through a lack of imagery, through secrecy and redaction. So the project was to comb through reports and leaked documents and Wikileaks and translate that source

material into architectural representation.

The book has three big sections, one of which is comprised entirely of drawings based on textual evidence and presented as evidentiary documents.

AA The question for architects might be one of complicity: translating abstract policy or bureaucracy into hard walls and barbed wire. What do you think about recent efforts to organize against designing prisons? Do you think the discipline has learned to take a clearer ethical stance?

JHC I’m not sure I would use the term complicity. The architects that design prisons or, in the case of black sites, the modular cells that could be shipped to Guantanamo Bay and around the world — that’s what they do, it’s their business.

It’s not that their work gets twisted into something undesirable and they don’t speak up. These firms specialize in making prisons. I’m all for trying to amend ethical guidelines for the AIA and other professional organizations, as well as university programs, that would restrict members from building prisons and execution chambers, like ADPSR [Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility] is doing, or calling on members of design organizations to refuse to build something like the border wall. I don’t think the AIA is going to take that on, and I’m not sure the AIA has proven to be a valuable partner in adjudicating

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I think the arena for addressing ethical practice is in the university, by teaching and modeling ethical practice in the classroom and studio. It’s hard to understand that there are architectures that produce forms of violence, racialization, and inequality around the world. These ideas should be part of a broader pedagogical understanding of the practice and the profession. There will always be a market for building prisons unless architects join in to support networks of abolition.

Who Builds Your Architecture? at the Art Institute of Chicago, 2016. Photo courtesy of AIC.

professional ethics. I think the arena for addressing ethical practice is in the university, by teaching and modeling ethical practice in the classroom and studio. It’s hard to understand that there are architectures that produce forms of violence, racialization, and inequality around the world. These ideas should be part of a broader pedagogical understanding of the practice and the profession. There will always be a market for building prisons unless architects join in to support networks of abolition.

AA You’ve done a lot of work on labor in architecture, including activism around construction work. What has been your experience with the coalition Who Builds Your Architecture? What is the next focus of the fight in the wake of COVID-19?

JHC For a long time Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?) was focused on forced labor on construction sites in Istanbul and Doha, yet there are plenty of cases of underpaid work here in the United States, an issue that overlaps with questions of migration. At WBYA? we’ve always been cognizant that we’re not operating as a policy group. We’re not a human-rights organization.

We’re a group of educators, and our goal is to bring questions of construction work, and fair labor more broadly, into the studio and classroom. We produce materials for professional-practice courses to bring these issues into discourses that would not necessarily consider them. The most productive use of our time has been working with people such as Peggy Deamer and Phil Bernstein, as well as the Architecture Lobby, to build a more cohesive organizational network focusing on issues of architectural labor. WBYA? is still focused on labor on the jobsite, but coming out of COVID-19 we’re trying to reorganize and focus more on wider local labor concerns. Architects have worked really, really hard to not be responsible for things that happen on the construction site, but with that they also lose the ability to speak up about things like safety, wages, and labor standards.

AA Absolutely. This past semester you taught an advanced studio with Mabel Wilson, as well as the seminar “Architecture, the State, and Racial Formation.” One thing that you’ve brought up several times is the role of architectural education in promoting a broader type of change in the ethical landscape of the profession. What

is your conception of the role of pedagogy in examining these issues? What new tools are students getting to better equip them to face the world of architecture?

JHC I was trained both in an architecture school and in an interdisciplinary humanities program, where I got a PhD. The seminar and studio this spring were conceived of as interdisciplinary courses. Architecture is not an individual act; it’s a group act requiring cooperation — there are a lot of authors to every architecture project. That’s also how academic research is done. The seminar is intended to reach outside of architecture as a discipline to think about how architecture fits into larger structures — in this case those of the state — and into the processes of racial formation. To do this we have to go outside of the architectural canon and then bring in architecture little by little. Toward the end of the semester we were reading texts on architecture written by architects, but we also spent lots of time thinking through the political history of the United States and its long legacy of racialization, and how space relates to both. Pedagogically the goal is to situate architecture within a broad network of interests, practices, and experiences and to understand that enriching architectural education, in terms of both design and spatial literacy, requires a multidisciplinary approach. The other side of this idea is to reinforce what architects do — the power of understanding space.

AA You’ve changed scales this year, from the architecture of prisons to the territories of post-plantation landscapes, in the studio. What are the connections between designing buildings for incarceration and territory as the spatialization of a state formation in the American case: the mapping, gridding, surveying, and transforming of land into an engine for production?

JHC The theme connecting most of my work is the underlying question about how state sovereignty, particularly American, is manifested in space, whether through particular architectures like prisons or through techniques of mapping and marking the land. I’m interested in the failure of state sovereignty — the impossibility of sovereignty — the fact that it’s not possible to have total control over the land, in the same way that it’s not possible to have total sovereignty over your own body in space.

Yet I still focus on materials and form. One of

my current projects traces the history of materials accumulating at the border: maps and monuments as well as fencing and electronic surveillance equipment.

What are they actually like? What is the material of the monument doing? When did it go from stone to cast iron? Why is it in the shape of an obelisk? When did fencing arrive? What is the history of that fencing material, from World War II advanced air defense bases and the landing strips that launched napalm attacks in Vietnam to the border between the United States and Mexico? How does surveillance equipment produce images of migrants, and how do those images feed into discourses on migration?

I am researching the links between the continual failure of sovereignty and its material manifestation, and how those links circulate through political narratives.

AA That’s a very interesting way to put it. It’s also interesting how material landscapes produce failure, like when the Jeffersonian grid runs up against mundane things like hills and rivers, and other real-world conditions that resist the inscription of ideas. You spoke about how one part of your book is about

drawing the spaces of black sites and producing documentation. What are some other ways to understand how abstract ideas, such as those as executed by a bureaucracy, are attempting (and failing) to generate a spatial reality?

JHC For every bill passed in the Senate, for every policy proposal and speech the Mayor of New York or the President gives, there’s a rich narrative embedded. But architects can help understand what is actually being proposed — how it will look and function as an everyday lived experience.

I did a book with photographer Chad Ress, who took the American Recovery Act and photographed what the money was actually funding. There is power in these big landscape-style photographs that show what government funding can and cannot do. And so, for me, it’s through drawing, photography, modeling, and other standard tools of architectural representation that we can understand space in new ways.

And, most importantly, we can also rework given narratives. There is real power in understanding different modes of visibility and different modes of aesthetic presence.

Chat Travieso and Keller Easterling Keller Easterling—architect, writer, and the Enid Storm Dwyer Professor of Architecture at Yale—spoke with artist, urbanist, and designer Chat Travieso (MArch ’10), Fall 2023 Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor.

Constructs You both look at ways in which infrastructure and the built environment act on people and spaces — or active form, to use Keller’s term.

Chat, you’ve published the article “A Nation of Walls” in Places Journal, about segregation walls and infrastructures of division. You’ve also done work with interventions that have positive effects on the environment, such as amenities for seating and for playing music. How do you make sure that the effects that you’re trying to produce as a designer are positive?

Keller, what examples of active form have you seen that ricochet correctly?

Detention cells at black sites in Lithuania and Romania. Drawings by Lindsey Wikstrom and Jordan H. Carver from Spaces of Disappearance: The Architecture of Extraordinary Rendition.

Chat Travieso I see urban interventions as both direct responses to everyday needs and poetic gestures. The work I do as an independent artist and designer, as well as with Yeju Choi for Yeju & Chat, is very much invested in working with what’s already happening on the ground. It’s meant to uplift existing efforts, not start from scratch.

People are already adapting their built environments to everyday needs. There are already social bonds and relations, and the work is designed to reinforce those and learn from them at the same time. I also see the work as a catalyst for larger actions. The temporary nature of this approach can be disappointing, however: it activates the space and people are excited, and then it goes away. So what is the afterlife of the intervention? Can it spur changes in policy? Can it exist at another site? In my research work I try to investigate the histories and policies that have shaped the built environment in order to start thinking more expansively about alternative futures and systems. Of course, Keller, having been your student, my thinking has been greatly influenced by your work.

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Keller Easterling We are talking about the design of things as well as of an interplay between things — how things might engage in a design ecology. It does not take away from anything the discipline already does but allows it to be effective in an additional register. It suggests interdependencies, or chain reactions, between things. The protocols for interactions are themselves infrastructures as worthy of funding as those of concrete and conduit. This is a moment when we’re rethinking the kind of infrastructures that build communities — that put together spatial, financial, social, or decommodifying protocols. It’s a prudent investment of our resources, it seems to me, since these kinds of interplay redouble any resource that’s given to them because they are alive. One seed, when planted, produces ten seeds.

Capital doesn’t understand this. These are community economies, which create a superabundance of value beyond any financial registration value. I guess I am looking for entanglements that enrich the situation.

Constructs One thing you both do so well is build theory from very specific examples. What is your research methodology? And what new projects will you be taking on?

CT My research process tends to be circuitous and multipronged — guided by conversations, connections, and relationships that blossom and multiply over time. “A Nation of Walls,” my project exploring the history of segregation walls that you mentioned earlier, is a good example of this. I’m originally from Miami, and in 2016 I read N.D.B. Connolly’s book A World More Concrete, about the history of real estate and Jim Crow in South Florida. Connolly describes several race

The Boogie Down (Youth) Booth, Chat Travieso, 2019. Part of a series of “Boogie Down Booth” installations done in collaboration with the organization WHEDco, it offers seating, lighting, and music by local artists. The music celebrates the borough’s rich musical heritage while masking street and train noise. The initial installation was created during a fellowship with the Design Trust for Public Space.

The protocols for interactions are themselves infrastructures as worthy of funding as those of concrete and conduit. We are talking about the design of things as well as of an interplay between things—how things might engage in a design ecology. It does not take away from anything the discipline already does but allows it to be effective in an additional register. walls throughout Miami, including the one in the Liberty City neighborhood that was a model for others built throughout the country. There’s a footnote that discusses a wall in Detroit. I’ve always had an interest in my creative practice to subvert objects of exclusion in the built environment, namely walls and fences, and turn them into spaces of community, of action. Naturally the subject of segregation barriers deeply intrigued me. I emailed Connolly to ask, “Is there more information about these walls?” And he replied that all the books he’s read mention segregation walls only in passing, and there’s no comprehensive study. So that triggered the research project. Concurrently I was talking with Tarell Alvin McCraney, who wrote the play that the movie Moonlight is based on and started a youth program in Liberty City oriented toward theater. He’s from there too and we both attended the New World School of Arts — but he wanted to bring in a more social justice community-based design aspect. He mentioned how when they were filming Moonlight he told the young actors about the wall, and they were shocked to learn not only that there was a wall built to separate Black and White neighborhoods but that there are still remnants of that wall today. That led to the “Wall (In)” project, a summer arts program in which local youth investigate the history of the Liberty City wall, talk to community members, and come up with ideas for interventions. I worked with Arts for Learning Miami and architect Germane Barnes to develop and facilitate the program from 2017 to ’19. So “Wall (In)” informed A Nation of Walls, and vice versa. In the Places Journal article you cited, I quote

Yes Loitering (Sign), Chat Travieso, 2015. This sign is meant to challenge adults’ spatial hegemony and exclusionary policies. It is a precursor to the “Yes Loitering” project, an ongoing research initiative with teenagers from the South Bronx exploring the intersection between youth and public space and advocating for a more inclusive city for young people.

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from interviews conducted by the youth with Melba Rose, Hattie Walker, and Phillip Walker, who were instrumental in this project.

One thing led to another, and I heard about more segregation barriers. People in Miami that I met were like, “Oh yeah, there was another wall over here.” “Oh, I remember those.” I wrote some things about this history online and started getting emails from people across the country telling me about walls in their hometowns. I also dove into the archives. So far I have uncovered evidence for more than thirty race barriers either still standing, removed, or planned in eighteen states. I try to ground this ongoing research as much as possible in oral histories and community engagement.

KE I want to work for you. Can you send me down to do a project in Miami?

Some of the work I’m doing is on a different scale. Maybe it’s something to do with my personality; my shyness may lead me to work in some other register on this kind of collaborative work. But if you hired me to do that sort of work for you, I would do it.

I’m working on something now that I’m really excited about. I’m reviving an old project from 1993: some counterfeit USGS maps and aerial photographs that were superimposing all the public land of the United States onto all the thin little stringy byways of interstate highway to claim a different mesh of land for many different negotiations. It was called ATTV because the first step was to merge some TVA land with the Appalachian Trail. The one I’m working on now is called ATTTNT. The idea is to highlight scars and wounds and trails and paths in the United States, and not shy away from the ugliness of this tangle. The line of connection is the Appalachian Trail, the Trail of Tears — one part of which happens to coincide with TVA public land — and the Natchez Trace. It makes a messy, vaguely linear formation passing through areas in Alabama and Mississippi that are rich with a 150-year history of elegant and resourceful resistance — freedmen towns, mutual aid societies, agricultural wheels, cooperatives, and episodes of the Civil Rights Movement.

The Revolutionary Action Movement’s proposal for the Republic of New Afrika had its capital in the adjacent Kush District of the Mississippi. The formation prompts the memory of all of these things and more.

The more than 6,000 miles of surface area aggregates land for reparations in new kinds of land trusts that can be used in many different ways. Rather than a single ideological solution, there is work being

done on multiple fronts with multiple authors and constitutions to achieve a kind of opacity, fugitivity, and robustness.

That’s the experiment we’re working on this summer. We are looking for low-hanging fruit in the inevitable failures of capital and governance — ways to release and decommodify land from property conundrums, forms of stagnation, oversubsidizing, and so on. It’s a different scale of endeavor, but it shares a habit of mind with what you’re doing.

CT I think what you’re doing is so fascinating, Keller. I’m very excited about it.

KE It also corresponds with your idea of making forms that return authorship to other people. The things you make break down barriers allowing other people to create their own forms. What will you be teaching at Yale?

CT I’m still trying to figure that out.

I’m debating between going deeper with the wall research and exploring issues of borders and boundaries. Another side of my research is an interest in young people, creating a more open, inclusive city for them.

Teens are not only seen as nuisances; they’re actively criminalized in public spaces, especially Black and Latinx youth. They are also completely forgotten in the design process. We think somewhat about young children. They have playgrounds, although we can think more expansively about this too. And obviously we consider adults in the process because those are the people who are typically doing the design. But where can teens go to feel safe and autonomous?

KE Teenagers are the subject. It seems like a good idea to try to be a teenager again.

In fall 2020 we did a studio where teens had an important role. We looked at the fat White middle of the United States. It was a chance for a White institution to work on Whiteness — a chore that only White institutions should have to do. One of the sites in this tangle of problems was Minneapolis. We made a community land trust that would divert subsidies from the USDA as well as the overfunded police in the urban areas of Minneapolis. It diverted funds from two monocultures into a community land trust to create a chain reaction of training, jobs, renewable energy, building reuse, and edible food production in both urban and rural areas.

CT I love that. Rarely do studios interrogate spaces of privilege and Whiteness as sites that necessitate action. What if we work on those communities and institutions that have been hoarding resources and imagine ways to redistribute those resources more equitably? There are remnants of a race wall in the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami. Unlike other spaces, like the Liberty City wall, where both sides of a wall are now predominantly Black due to white flight, the Coconut Grove wall still holds that color line. You see the redlining maps, and then you see the Google aerial view. You can see how the tree canopy is different — it absolutely aligns with the redlining map, which also aligns with where the wall is to this day.

To address the disparity between the two sides of the wall — the difference in the tree canopy being just a symptom of deeper systemic injustices — and enact a reparative praxis, we must focus our attention on dismantling the structures that perpetuate

ATTTNT, Keller Easterling, 2023.

advantages for wealthy White neighborhoods to the detriment of communities of color.

KE One thing we’re trying to do in the university is to demonstrate the importance of spatial variables to leveraging reparations. More authority is given to legal and econometric variables. It is stronger to multiply approaches to reparations — to make the effort more robust and harder to target. I wish culture had another kind of spatial fluency. In the university it’s remarkably hard to make even obvious arguments about the link between land tenure and the environment.

Constructs What are you both planning in terms of pedagogy for the year ahead? What are the things you’re hoping to invite students to think about at this moment in time? What excites you about teaching now?

CT Architects might not perceive how the law and policy have spatial consequences.

I want to bring into the classroom an understanding of how policymaking can be a design tool that shapes our material geographies, as well as how architecture is a form of regulation. I also want to introduce students to participatory methodologies in which they would engage with community stakeholders, including young people, in the design process. Youth might not buy into some of the social, economic, and political assumptions that we make, so they are able to imagine alternatives that might allow us to see other worlds. That’s the really exciting part of teaching studio. The best kind of studio is not just a thought experiment but a potential tool for capacity building and imagining a world into existence.

KE Catalyzed a little bit by the pandemic and Zoom access to many different people, pedagogical experiments can treat students as if they have already started their careers. We are working together on something that can leap beyond the academy into contact with constituents, activists, and potential partners in design.

We’re using the academy as a place to stage something that is not beholden just to this place but to many other people outside the university. Using the university to build coalitions across disciplines really raises the stakes. Students can find those partners now, while they are in school. Returning to the activist roots of the MED program, starting next year, there will be three fully funded researchers every year. Spatial knowledge and skills are crucial to working with other disciplines. It seems so important now for our students’ survival, and it extends applications of the skills we already have.

It’s just that there’s more to do of what we know how to do.

Returning to the activist roots of the MED program, starting next year, there will be three fully funded researchers every year.

ATTTNT, Keller Easterling, 2023.

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School News Excerpts from Denise Scott Brown: A Symposium

As she declared in 1981, Denise Scott Brown became a feminist mainly because of “experiences in my professional life,” and throughout her career — in her writings, practice, and teaching — she has actively campaigned to change the profession.

Her own life, she said, was a quarry, and she has not been afraid to draw from her own struggles with discrimination, petty slights, and lack of recognition to write about what must be done to make architecture a more egalitarian, humane, and diverse profession.

Sometimes this meant tackling the failure of architects to address the needs — even the smallest and most mundane — of women in their daily lives, as she did in her marvelous 1967 essay “Planning the Powder Room.”

What woman, even today, has not experienced some of the frustrations she has so wittily described, despite our constant thinking about what bathrooms should be today? In other instances it meant confronting head-on the culture of the profession, as she did in a talk at the Alliance of Women in Architecture, in 1973, and then again in her 1975 essay “Sexism and the Star System,” a shorter version of which was finally published in the feminist anthology Architecture: A Place for Women, in 1989. Scott Brown attacked the blatant sexism in the profession, the notion of a sole designer on top, the cult of personality, the boys’ club atmosphere, the exclusion of women in professional gatherings, the press’s lack of coverage of women architects, and the glass ceiling that prohibited women’s advancement. … In so many ways she foreshadowed concerns that are still important to us today. Moreover, in contrast to many women architects of her generation, she did not take pride in being an “exceptional one.” Indeed she delighted in the rise of women in the field in the mid-1970s and how the talent and enthusiasm of young women, as she wrote, “has burst creativity into the profession.”

But she was also a hard-core realist about their prospects, recognizing that they too would face discrimination, and she urged them to have a “feminist awareness” as they confronted professional obstacles.

Mary McLeod Professor, Columbia University

Denise Scott Brown, 1978 ©Lynn Gilbert

Fifty years after the publication of Learning from Las Vegas, Frida Grahn has convened “Denise Scott Brown: A Symposium,” presenting new scholarship related to the groundbreaking studio methods developed by the architect in the 1960s. Building on the newly published anthology Denise Scott Brown in Other Eyes: Portraits of an Architect, the symposium took place in Hastings Hall on February 8, 2023. Following are excerpts of papers, remarks, and discussions from the event.

Half a century ago the now famous and oft-quoted, if not always completely understood, book Learning from Las Vegas was published. It grew out of, in part, a studio taught here at the Yale School of Architecture in 1968 by Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi.

In the winter of 2009–10 the exhibition What We Learned: The Yale Las Vegas Studio and the Work of Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates was displayed at the school’s gallery in Paul Rudolph Hall. It included 100 photographs taken during the 1968 trip that would underpin Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi’s research on Las Vegas. In a recent New Yorker article Christopher Hawthorne wrote,

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“What struck me when I went back to reread the book is how deliberately it works to collapse the distance, and therefore the distinction, between enthusiasm and skepticism, and ultimately between documentation and critique. Above all, Learning from Las Vegas argues for a curious and open-minded anti-utopianism, for understanding cities as they are rather than how planners wish they might be — and then using that knowledge, systematically and patiently won, as the basis for new architecture.”

Deborah Berke Dean and J. M. Hoppin Professor, Yale School of Architecture

I am incredibly honored and delighted to be here today to celebrate the life and career of Denise Scott Brown. It is the first opportunity to reflect on her work and continue to develop the ideas we explored together in the book Denise Scott Brown in Other Eyes, after working separately on three different continents for two years. As Mary pointed out, the more common way to order things would be to organize a symposium first and publish the papers afterward, but this time we are doing it the other way around. It is wonderful to see so many of the authors in person.

Nine of the twenty-four contributors are with us, and the subject of the discussion — Denise Scott Brown — is attending via Zoom.

Although the symposium marks the anniversary of Learning from Las Vegas, neither the book nor the studio is the main topic of discussion today. An important reason for this is that it has already been done 13 years ago, in January 2010, at the three-day conference “Architecture after Las Vegas,” organized by Stanislaus von Moos and held here at Hastings Hall. Quite a few of you were present at that event, as were Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, who as you know sadly passed away in 2018. The conference papers were published in the anthology Eyes That Saw: Architecture after Las Vegas, in 2020.

We will talk indirectly about Las Vegas: how its lessons can be applied, not to build casinos but to save small towns, for instance.

We will look at civil rights and social justice, taking Denise Scott Brown’s message to heart that the Las Vegas Studio was as much a social project as it was about form. Although the Las Vegas project was heavily indebted to her ideas, she has so far been the subject of only sparing scholarly attention.

Her contributions have long remained

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unrecognized or wrongly attributed. In my conversations with Denise, as she prefers to be called, she has often struck me with amazement. Doors kept opening into unexpected fields, and I realized how little is commonly known about her. There are still unknown aspects to her thinking, and few commentators have gone beyond the wellknown catchwords. So today we will highlight Denise’s conceptual contributions, distinct voice, and incisive impact on architectural education, urban planning, and design.

Frida Grahn Editor and PhD candidate, USI Academy of Architecture, Mendrisio

The Nonjudgmental Attitude: Learning from Three Continents In her landmark essay “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning,” to quote just one of many delightfully alliterative titles she devised, Scott Brown describes the creative impulse as an act of trying to like what one does not like, or what we refer to today as embracing a nonjudgmental attitude. Just as Claes Oldenburg and Pop Art had expanded the definition of art to include vestiges and echoes of the everyday world around us, Learning from Las Vegas would expand that of architecture, or rather the array of questions, concerns, objects, and places deemed worthy of the architect’s attention, fundamentally changing what it means to think and see and act in the world as an architect. … Learning from Las Vegas put forward a vision of architectural education as an essentially social, collectively driven activity embodying an understanding of architectural knowledge constructed not by appeal to authority — be that a person, precedent, method, or nugget of received wisdom — but through critical and creative engagement with a wide range of essentially different, potentially unlikable, others. It envisioned architectural education as an active and ever-changing process of inquiry by which students aren’t told what to think but rather shown — out in the desert, out on the Strip, camera in hand — how to think.

Surry Schlabs (BA ’99, MArch ’03, PhD ’17) Senior Lecturer, Yale School of Architecture

On the Outside Looking Around: ‘Mine Is an African View of Las Vegas’ In contrast to the urbanism of Johannesburg, Scott Brown learned many important lessons from camping and fossil-hunting trips in the vast expanses of the veld in the Makapan Valley, a three-hour drive to the north: “Eventually I came to compare our wilderness landscapes with the city, feeling that both established complex laws with or without our intervention.” This geography and climate fostered a design approach that was mindful of environmental conditions as well as a touchstone for questioning cultural and colonial identity. From an early age Scott Brown noted the disjuncture between her physical reality and the colonial ideal shaped by the media. … On one hand, an African view describes a way of seeing, of valuing the objects, places, and spaces that exist in one’s everyday life and locale; on the other hand, her “African view” comprised a lived experience in Johannesburg as a White South African facing complex realities of race and ethnicity. Part of Scott Brown’s African view included her experience with the local folk architecture in the town of Mapoch, where the Ndebele people built mud houses with thatched roofs and painted the exteriors with colorful geometric patterns based on both indigenous and adopted motifs. … Scott Brown saw a strong correspondence between the boomtown desert urbanisms of Johannesburg and Las Vegas, just as her childhood trips to

14 the veld allowed her to see the complex laws and shared relationships between rural and urban. She found a similar rich contrast in Las Vegas and had the same urge to understand it.

Craig Lee Assistant Curator, Art Institute of Chicago

On Camp, Revolutionariness, and Architecture The gaze of these two architects could be described as camp inasmuch as it seems to be nonjudgmental, depoliticized, and amoral. Indeed both made it clear on several occasions that they should not be bothered for a lack of social commitment. Steadfast in keeping the different concerns apart, they insisted that the morality of commercial advertising, gambling interest, and the competitive instinct was not at issue here. …

They were more liberal than radical, but by questioning the founding of good taste and acknowledging popular culture they opened up a new front in the campaign for the democratization of architecture — not from the top to the bottom, but from the bottom to the top. For Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, being a revolutionary architect did not mean dreaming of utopia but simply showing empathy for people’s true expectations and for the existing city.

Valéry Didelon Professor, ENSA Normandie

‘Strange’ Appearances: On Pop Art, Hamburgers, and Urbanists Venturi and Scott Brown’s pedagogical and published projects reveal sustained attention to and integration of Pop Art. Studio programs and work topics designed by Scott Brown reveal the significant influence of large object-sculptures by Claes Oldenburg and her perspicacious response to his career. In 1969, between the Las Vegas and Levittown studios, Oldenburg’s work became more accessible to a general audience in a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. In May, the same month Scott Brown published the article “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning,” the sculpture Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks was installed in the heart of the Yale campus.

It was commissioned by the Colossal Keepsake Corporation, an organization of students, faculty, and alumni formed to introduce revolutionary monuments to college campuses. With stylized vehicle treads and vibrant cosmetic pigment, whose original vinyl tip could be inflated (soon replaced by a fiberglass version), it suggested projection and progress in literal and symbolic terms,

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as well as a radical recasting of the iconography of the adjacent World War I memorial. The final assignment turned specifically to hamburgers and clarified Scott Brown’s application of the artist’s growing influence, articulating “the shift in vision and understanding which an Oldenburg can induce.” The “Oldenburg Interpretation” asked students to “do for housing what Oldenburg did for hamburgers.”

As Scott Brown has recently mentioned, she had in mind the artist’s 1962 Floor Burger, explaining that “if he had a way of artistically interpreting a hamburger, we as architects should be able to artistically interpret a suburban house.”

Katherine Smith Professor, Agnes Scott College

Panel Discussion: Nonjudgmental Attitude: Learning from Three Continents Surry Schlabs I was wondering if each of you might explore the question of politics in Learning from Las Vegas, in the work of Denise Scott Brown, and in this strain of architectural thinking.

Craig Lee Revisiting the first edition of the book for the symposium, I found a footnote, a description of the studio that lists all the students, that I hadn’t come across before: “This has been a technical studio…

Don’t bug us for lack of social concern. We are trying to train ourselves to offer socially relevant skills.” It comes to me now just because of the criticism you’re raising about the lack of politics in Learning from Las Vegas that Venturi, Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour had a sense of the limits of what they could do.

Valéry Didelon I would like to remind everyone that when Venturi Scott Brown published Learning from Las Vegas Richard Nixon was elected president of the United States. What is also interesting is that the audience for the book was very political.

Charles Moore was saying the book was embattled in a political sense. What I tried to explain today is that I think Learning from Las Vegas was a way to shift the ground where politics was happening. After 1968 the class struggle was fading away and cultural conflicts were taking on more importance — and Learning from Las Vegas is really at the forefront of the new cultural battle.

Denise Scott Brown I do not agree.

We’re very concerned socially, and that’s why we are looking at Pop Art and communication from Las Vegas. I was the one trying to help save South Street, and I was working with Black activists. …

But for all of that, a lot of these social and physical and cultural questions are addressed by saying that these are things people like and want to use.

Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks by Claes Oldenburg in the courtyard of Yale’s Morse College, as photographed by Benjamin Piascik in July 2023.

In another instance, as we were involved in these questions of Pop Art and what is ugly and what is not ugly, William Wheaton, the head of the planning department at Penn, then the dean of the architecture school at Berkeley, in his lecture on city planning, announced to us, “You architects design public space that no one uses.

They stay away in droves. Why don’t you go to Las Vegas and see what people really like?” So that is what we did. One morning as I took the early bus to the casinos, it broke down, and a discussion started among us passengers. The casino workers turned angrily to me and said, “You think that all we live for here is one-armed bandits. In fact, we don’t. We get our recreation at Lake Mead.”

These working-class people had no great love for Las Vegas, perhaps because, being there all day, they got tired of it.

You can’t scorn them, and we weren’t lacking in social concern; we were using what we were learning.

Introduction to the panel “The City in Flux: Form, Forces, and Functions”

Frida Grahn introduces the symposium on February 8 in Hastings Hall. Photograph by AJ Artemel.

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The title of our session is drawn in part from the name Scott Brown gave to the urban design studios she taught at UCLA and Penn.

We have three excellent papers from scholars who have plumbed the DSB archives to retrieve narratives from Scott Brown’s mid-1960s pedagogy in urban design at those two institutions. The results are fascinating and revelatory. They reveal how indebted we are to Scott Brown’s synthesis of the work of her mentors and colleagues, as well as to her timelessness and work ethic as an educator formulating urban studies and design as an interdisciplinary inquiry into the social, political, and economic bases of city and regional development, and their changes over time. We also find here, in Scott Brown’s

considerations of meaning in urban design and reckoning with functionalism, the intellectual antecedents of what would eventually become the groundbreaking work about Las Vegas and the basis of a multidisciplinary design practice that would fundamentally upend established modes of urban representation.

Elihu Rubin (BA ’99) Associate Professor, Yale School of Architecture

What Does 40th Street ‘Want to Be’?: Tracing the Pedagogy of Denise Scott Brown at the University of Pennsylvania, 1960–1964 The studio course that advanced Scott Brown’s pedagogical methodology the most was perhaps “Studio FFF2: Form, Forces, and Function,” taught in fall 1964. The first iteration of this course, taught the previous year, focused on a range of topics, such as Arlo Braun’s study for a highway hotel and Gerry Wolfe’s “Street as Space & Shelter Today.”

By contrast, FFF2 was a semester-long case study on Philadelphia’s 40th Street, echoing the West Philadelphia study site from “Introduction to Urban Design.” Scott Brown’s guiding question to students was, “What should 40th Street* be?” That asterisk signaled a note that explained that, for the professor, 40th Street pertained to a zone four blocks wide between 38th and 42nd Streets, Woodland Cemetery, and Fairmount Park. At the time these blocks were a mix of residential, commercial, institutional, and industrial areas west of Penn’s campus.

This “band of change,” as Scott Brown called it, was experiencing great shifts. Under the banner of federally backed “urban renewal,” Penn, Drexel Institute of Technology,

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Illustration of the West Center service node featured in Denise Scott Brown’s plan for South Street, Philadelphia.

Philadelphia College of Pharmacy & Science, and the Presbyterian and Osteopathic hospitals were all expanding their campuses to create “University City,” by demolishing residences and businesses — and displacing the predominantly African-American neighborhood of Black Bottom in the process.

In her course notes Scott Brown pointed out that Penn’s expansion had “nothing to say of the existing, and thriving, commercial nucleus at 40th and Spruce.”

By choosing this site Scott Brown was asking her students to engage the effects of urban renewal that were underway and to consider alternatives.

Lee Ann Custer NEH Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow, Vanderbilt University

Positioning Denise Scott Brown: Los Angeles, 1965–1966 A relatively small selection of extraordinary images taken by Scott Brown showing what we would now call “the novel ecologies” — generated by freeways cutting through mountains, houses perched precariously on canyon edges, and agricultural land paved over for parking lots — have been widely reproduced. However the archive of her photographic corpus is comprised of an extraordinarily large number of relatively ordinary images taken from above: from planes and, most interestingly, helicopters that traveled through a specific airspace that belongs neither to the logic of the close and granular view from the ground nor to the omnipotent and totalizing view then being developed by satellite imaging.

Scott Brown’s images are not merely taken from the helicopter; they are helicopter images: middle-distance views that offer neither individuals, nor singularities, nor comprehensive panoramas. Often hazy and unbounded, these images seek patterns and/or data. They are images for and of research — remote, detached, distanced. Helicoptering was becoming ubiquitous in Los Angeles during the 1960s and drew all sorts of things into its airspace. Visitors to the studio, including Herbert Gans and Philip Thiel, submitted receipts for helicopter tickets because copter fleets functioned as public transportation. Disneyland offered rides both as transportation to the park and as entertainment over the park. Most of the pilots were veterans, particularly from Vietnam, where the Huey had begun as a means of Medevac in 1958 and became a key component of the U.S military arsenal. Helicopters were also new and important features of the information environment, permitting live film footage of events unfolding below.

The Watts Uprising was one event that brought the impact of urban renewal into suburban homes via the safe distance afforded by the Telecopter link. The middle-distance space created by helicopter traffic in the effort to visualize and manage urban information derived from a range of contradictory sources — sociological data,

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one-on-one interviews, news media, etc.

— had its textual analog in the way Scott Brown’s syllabus organized discourse.

Sylvia Lavin Professor, Princeton University

Functionalism as Fixation and Foil The question remains open: If Denise Scott Brown had published “Determinants of Urban Form,” could it have been her version of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, establishing her voice as an individual? As much as she resisted the model of heroic sole authorship, she also wanted very much to be heard. The chance to participate in important disciplinary social and conceptual conversations, along with accurate authorial attribution, were very important to her. One legacy of this critical juncture is clear. Forty years after her statement “The Function of a Table,” Scott Brown remained a defiant counterreformation functionalist, calling this ethos “a glory of Modern architecture” and her “profession’s joy” in 2008. For her, functionalist designers paradoxically do not try to control what structures will do. They clarify needs, aesthetics, and principles, yes, but they also “recognize and respond to everything in flux that impinges upon them.” As she put it, “To face the ugly results of doing the right thing” produces an “agonized beauty … the kind I like — and it can change aesthetic sensibilities. That is my view of functionalism.” For Scott Brown, functional design accepts the ways dynamic systems of form and forces inflect one another, what Lee Ann Custer called “this complex and oscillating relationship.”

Denise Costanzo Associate Professor, Pennsylvania State University

Panel Discussion: The City in Flux: Form, Forces, and Functions Elihu Rubin One of the prominent elements in all of these papers is the way in which the archives have been brought to the surface and showcased in many ways. What were you looking for when you set off into these archives? Did you have a clear question, or did you let things develop as you discovered them? How did you decide on some of the wonderful artifacts you chose to present to us today?

Lee Ann Custer I focused on Venturi’s class on the theories of architecture and how it related to Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. The 1964 syllabus has Scott Brown’s name at the top, so I wanted to know more about their collaboration during that year. I also just wanted to know a lot more about what Scott Brown had taught at Penn. So that was the kernel that opened up into this project.

Sylvia Lavin I think about the archive in the way the Surrealists thought about the flea market, which is that they are always the same. What’s different is the perspective you bring on any given day. I’ve been in the

Scott Brown archive many times, always concerned about slightly different things.

On this occasion, I was thinking that the name Denise Scott Brown, the topic of this symposium and publication, was a problem because if you ask an archive a monographic question you are sure to get a monographic answer. Paradoxically, however, we have learned a great deal from Scott Brown about the importance of rejecting monographic models of authorship so I wanted to figure out how to address and not address Scott Brown at the same time. I began by looking in the archives for things that I thought might lead me both to and away from her. My hunch was that her tenure-review letters would serve this purpose, enabling me to avoid hagiography and presentism by focusing on critical assessments of her work made in 1966. What I found was a series of letters that she had solicited not as part of the formal tenure process but as evaluations of her studio teaching. I was struck by her decision to request them and even more struck by the fact that she kept them all, even quite unflattering ones.

It seemed like a remarkable attachment to some notion of the objective integrity of the historical record, even if the record consisted of highly subjective, even personally snarky, statements. This first set of documents led me down a rabbit hole filled with people critiquing her. She asked for responses to her syllabus… and she got them! From my perspective on that day, her archive operated as a repository of how political discourse unfolded within academia as colleagues from different disciplines took each other to task for failing to learn from their different knowledge domains. The sociologist complained about excluding women as a category of urban subjects and the planner complained about neglecting to address the role of racial covenants as determinants of urban form. That Scott Brown exposed these “failures” suggests that, at least to me, such failures to communicate are precisely what interdisciplinarity achieved in 1966.

Denise Costanzo I found the syllabus and comments incredibly fascinating as well. If anything, I think it’s a demonstration of a commitment to radical honesty. It’s something we do all the time in academic writing when we get these anonymous peer reviews. But there’s something so bracingly transparent about saying, I’m not only going to make sure this idea is included; I’m going to make sure you know that I did not think of it first.

Sylvia Lavin Maybe we could also call it radical positioning because it’s important to think about the impact of using the phrase “I have a dream” in a syllabus in 1966. That was a line that didn’t need attribution, but did that make it available to be appropriated?

Denise Costanzo About ten years ago I grappled with the question of what Venturi and Scott Brown actually mean when they call themselves functionalists.

And given that this signals the moment when they became much more closely bound, it was a way to tease out which voice is whose. I think there’s an incredibly important conversation to have about the impossibility of that on one level, but it’s also part of a larger question about erasure and attribution. When someone is dealing with the professional conditions she was working in, there is a tendency to elide her presence and voice. There is clearly a legitimate project in figuring that out.

fraught affair, as questions of the exercise of power and the construction of taste complicated the notion of the public good upon which Burnham unquestioningly relied. These three papers help illuminate how she probed these difficult questions in the 1960s and ’70s and the resulting nondoctrinaire approach that she put forward in her own work.

Izzy Kornblatt PhD student, Yale School of Architecture

With Lots of Love: South Street, 1968–1972 Opposition to the expressway in public hearings in May 1964 came mere months before the revolt of Black citizens to counter police violence in North Philadelphia, the first in a series of actions across the United States that rose to a zenith in the long hot summer of 1967.

That year, in fact, objections to a store owner’s discrimination against Black customers on South Street were met with injunctions to obstruct their protest. Police commissioner Frank Rizzo oversaw the deployment of 500 police officers in riot suits to quash nascent unrest in the streets. In one of Scott Brown’s photographs the watchwords Black Power writhe across a vacant storefront in aerosol paint. The viewer senses the invisible presence of Black assertion, under peril of abuse and obliteration, rendering the air electric.

Scott Brown later wrote that on South Street and in other early projects “social change and the unrest that went with it dogged my steps in every place. Fortuitously the lessons learned in one tied neatly to the next, and many questions resolve themselves in planning school … during the Civil Rights Movement.” … Evident in Scott Brown’s prose is a clear and alternative conception of the country’s bicentennial as an occasion to celebrate Black histories in Philadelphia. The very first page of her counter-plan asserts, “We recommend that South Street’s importance historically and culturally to immigrant groups and particularly, today, to Negro culture be spelled out for the Bicentennial in a manner that matches Society Hill.” She also calls for measures to ensure residents access to health care, education, recreation, and commerce. The document proposes the institution of a “Museum of Slavery,” a “Museum of Immigrant Culture,” and a “Promenade of Negro Culture and History.” Scott Brown’s research shows the consideration of historic-preservation tactics and mechanisms to formalize them just at the cusp of the development of academic preservationist disciplines in American graduate programs. The text of her counter-plan prioritizes the involvement of South Street residents in the rehabilitation efforts, with specific reference to Black business owners.

Sarah Moses (BA ’10) PhD candidate, Harvard University

Introduction to the panel Make No Big Plans: South Street vs. Co-op City Daniel Burnham said, “Make no little plans.

They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized.

Make big plans. Aim high in hope and work remembering that a noble logical diagram once recorded will never die but long after we are gone will be a living thing asserting itself with an ever-growing insistency.” …

Scott Brown wrote of her admiration for Burnham’s conception of the city as a set of urban systems, a plurality, and an ordered complexity, but planning for that plurality had by her time become a far more

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The first page of the article “Co-op City: Learning to Like It,” in the February 1970 issue of Progressive Architecture.

Learning from Co-op City, or What Price Aesthetics?

Denise has said that the thesis of the duck and the decorated shed occurred to her and Bob as they were commuting up to New Haven from Philadelphia, looking out the train window at vernacular industrial buildings before arriving at the A&A Building. The contrast between high architecture and the everyday built environment suggested the metaphor of the duck and the decorated shed. Half a century later, I was also commuting from Philadelphia to teach at Yale, and the view from the train window — of Co-op City, visible on the left going north — initially prompted my interest in revisiting the rather surprising and controversial article by Denise and Bob that appeared in Progressive Architecture in February 1970: “Co-op City: Learning to Like It.” …

The article, which brazenly went against orthodox architectural opinion, elicited outraged letters from a number of the magazine’s readers. The editors chose to publish two of the more indignant ones in the April issue, under the heading “Co-op City Controversy.” The first came from Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, who was then teaching at Columbia University. Not mincing words, she pointed out the article’s contradictions with Venturi’s argument in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, which had appeared four years earlier, declaring it “profoundly shocking that an architect whose primary inspiration would seem to have come from the urban facades of Italy should so cleverly ignore the deadly antiurbanism of this project.” The second letter came from architect Ulrich Franzen, who likewise expressed shock. Couching his response in terms of recent political events, he denounced the authors’ endorsement of “status quo doctrine,” declaring that “one year after the election of the Nixon administration” the defense of “Co-op City’s coarsely scaled and lifeless community on grounds of lowest cost and the implied endorsement of existing subsidy policies” raised “the ghost of a silent majority architecture.” Several months later Scott Brown responded to both MoholyNagy and Franzen with her own broadside.

Dated September 1970, the six-page letter, addressed to editor-in-chief Forrest Wilson, went unpublished but a carbon copy is conserved in the Penn archives. It begins by complimenting Moholy-Nagy for her previous “sensible and refreshing” critiques of “the latest architectural and planning dogma.” Scott Brown then goes on to castigate Moholy-Nagy for endorsing “architect-designed social housing” that “cannot be afforded by the majority of the urban workforce.” As to Franzen’s “currently fashionable Nixon-silent-majority

critique,” Scott Brown notes that “there seems to be a very fine line between liberalism and class snobbery.” She concludes with a pointed comment on “the question of ascription.” After initially referring to “Venturi and his wife,” MoholyNagy had used the masculine pronoun throughout her letter to the editor, while Franzen had ignored Scott Brown’s contribution altogether. So Scott Brown undertook to set the record straight: “I wrote the article. It contains an inseparable amalgam of our shared opinions but owes as much to my planning experience and research in housing, here and particularly in development areas, as to either of our architectural theories. For the record, one of us writes the first draft, the other adds, criticizes, and edits; whoever is named first wrote the first draft.

This is a fairly standard academic procedure. Missing its implication implies a male chauvinism which can be expected from the Franzens of the profession but hardly from the wife of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.”

Surry Schlabs (BA ’99, MArch ’03, PhD ’17) Senior Lecturer, Yale School of Architecture

Joan Ockman Vincent Scully Visiting Professor, Yale School of Architecture

‘Make Little Plans’: Scott Brown at the Fiftieth Anniversary of CIAM The balancing act between critique and celebration at La Sarraz 1978 was received with mixed emotions. Yet Scott Brown remembers the event fondly as the first time she and Venturi “went public in Switzerland.” Judging from comments and media accounts, her contribution must have been one of the most consequential, even though she was treated as the “wife of the speaker.” Scott Brown extended the discussion about meaning in architecture to the scale of the city and its inhabitants, offering a viable alternative to CIAM-inspired tabula rasa urban renewal. Presenting her work and ideas at La Sarraz, Scott Brown took part as a practitioner and innovative thinker in her own right. Her opposition to the Athens Charter would be a constant throughout her work. Scott Brown’s strategy of “little plans,” her advocacy for keeping existing structures, is an early example of dealing with the given, which combined her social, economic, and functional concerns.

Her ideas remain relevant today — especially in light of the ongoing climate crisis. Denise, the floor is yours.

Frida Grahn Editor and PhD candidate, USI Academy of Architecture, Mendrisio

Photograph of South Street, Philadelphia, by Denise Scott Brown, 1960s.

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Learning from Las Vegas put forward a vision of architectural education as an essentially social, collectively driven activity embodying an understanding of architectural knowledge constructed not by appeal to authority—be that a person, precedent, method, or nugget of received wisdom—but through critical and creative engagement with a wide range of essentially different, potentially unlikable, others. It envisioned architectural education as an active and ever-changing process of inquiry by which students aren’t told what to think but rather shown—out in the desert, out on the Strip, camera in hand—how to think.

Denise and Dean Berke conclude the evening. Photograph by Sang Ji Han.

Response by Denise Scott Brown The planner of Co-op City wanted to be heard for his social concerns. He was a Russian immigrant. And later we heard an account by Sonia Sotomayor of going as a child into public housing with her family and being delighted by its size and views, and from there arose the notion that you cut away certain things to provide other things that may delight certain people. So it’s not to exclude one for the other, but to recognize a range of preferences. In working with people on South Street I found a range of people and values, but what most people wanted was the same thing Sotomayor described, whereas I wanted to save some of the more beautiful nineteenth-century stores, and so did the historians. People wanted houses that were in good condition that they could afford. Also, I found Alice Lipscomb very much preferred the Italian and racist Frank Rizzo to the upper class and liberal Richardson Dilworth and felt that Rizzo heard and listened to her problems and tried to help her more than the circle of liberals.

Yes, it is puzzling, and no, I haven’t solved it, but I was amazed with the sharing values of all these groups I worked for.

Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Black people had similar opinions about living on South Street. But the White people didn’t want the Black people there. That was the only difference.

There’s a tragedy in our lives now: we are about to lose the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery. It’s going to be so altered and ruined that it will not be the same. And we know that something is going to happen to Wu Hall as well. Also I think there’s another that’s going to be altered. A lot has been written about that, and I would like to ask you as an audience to look it up and inundate them with

School News

complaints. … But then there’s another point that has to do with the CIAM. I began to realize that we architects need a bag of tools for dealing with urbanism in ways we can understand. Le Corbusier was right to want to formulate what I would call not a charter but a bag of tools. Let’s make it a workable, not a scary, thing: a small bag of tools. And let’s say, “You need this kind of information before you can do anything about a city, in the same way as you need to know what supports a beam before you can design a building.” …

There were two gurus at Penn around architecture: one was Louis Kahn and the other was Walter Isard, who invented this way of approaching the pattern-making that forces — natural, social, and economic — impose on city form. They can be the natural forces of change we know about so well now. They can be the unyielding stone physiognomy of rocky areas, but also social forces, the behavior and the structural development of populations. Knowing enough about them to understand the patterns and paths they make has served us for years in establishing the first partis of many of our complex projects. … I should tell you one other thing: Deborah, it’s not your fault. It’s that last meeting at Yale. There was a show of our work, and also a conference, a lot like today’s conference. And it was a pretty nice conference, and I helped a lot with the show. I’d done all the descriptions and designed a little seminar area in the show so people could hold a seminar there. And we came to the conference. But it turned out I wasn’t going to be in it. Thank you, Bob Stern. What happened was he said, “Yes, you’ll be in it on Saturday,” and everyone left on Friday. So I gave the talk to the students, and they made sure to tell Stern that I gave them the best lecture of all.

I am so very grateful indeed for the spirit, expertise, and goodwill with which the contributors here and Frida approached my work.

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Building Project Update The 2022 Jim Vlock First Year Building Project debuted on October 2, 2022, at a reception attended by the Yale University president, Peter Salovey. The event also honored the legacy of Paul Brouard (MArch ’61), who led the Building Project for more than 40 years, with reminiscences from many former students and colleagues.

Students present at the Building Project final review on April 18, 2023. Photograph by Benjamin Piascik.

The 2022 two-bedroom accessory dwelling unit — located behind the 2019 project, on Plymouth Street — was the last in a six-year collaboration with Columbus House, a New Haven homelessness services provider.

Perched just above the Metro North railroad tracks, the house provided challenges for student designers including how to insulate the living quarters from train noise and ensure privacy from the existing house while providing residents with open space.

The 2023 project is the first in a series of collaborations between first-year MArch I students and a new client: Friends Center for Children, which provides early childhood care and education for children ages three months to five years. The center seeks to create a campus with housing for their educators. In May construction started on the first of four dwellings to be built on a forested two-acre lot in Fair Haven Heights. Brady Stone (MArch ’04) and Paul Freudenburg (MArch/MEM ’22) are joining the Building Project director, Adam Hopfner (MArch ’99), on-site for the first time.

The selected project is a two-story house designed with the client’s Quaker values in mind: “Peace is prioritized through the separation of private and public spaces, providing ample personal living areas for each family. Equity is ensured through equal proportion of space on both upper and lower levels, with diverse experiences for different lifestyles. Community is fostered through communal spaces, such as a generous kitchen and a light-filled foyer. Integrity is reflected in the design’s consideration of ease of construction, cost effectiveness, and sustainability with features like a green roof.

Stewardship is maintained through careful attention to construction elements and safety for children. Simplicity is embraced in the overall design, by adopting a familiar form that blends into the surrounding landscape.”

Each of the house’s two two-bedroom apartments has its own living room, but they share a common entrance, kitchen, dining room, laundry facility, and reading area. These shared spaces are oriented away from the street toward the center of what in future years will become the campus of the Friends Center for Children.

François Dallegret: Beyond the Bubble 2023 Team A final model for the 2023 Jim Vlock First Year Building Project. Photograph by Benjamin Piascik.

Students lift an interior wall into place. Photograph by Benjamin Piascik.

Pouring the foundation walls. Photograph by Benjamin Piascik.

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2022 Jim Vlock First Year Building Project. Photographs by Tom Hsu (MArch ’24) and Brandon Lim (MArch ’24).

Swag from Friends Center for Children distributed at the Building Project review. Photograph by Benjamin Piascik.

Much to François Dallegret’s credit, the passage of time makes it no easier to write about the artist’s work. He remains a vexing member of the mid-twentieth-century avant-garde, much like Paul Rudolph, designer of the bushhammered gallery where Dallegret’s work was on display this spring.

Over the course of his career, Dallegret’s varied and prolific output attracted a variety of labels, which were slapped on, accumulated, and slowly slid off like weak fridge magnets. Contemporaries have labeled him variously as architect, designer, artist, car buff, jester, eccentric visionary, provocateur, bricoleur, entrepreneur, “half Piranesi, half Harpo Marx,” sanctimonious, profane. The list is infinite and always more than partially apt. Sifting through the vast detritus of Dallegret’s shifting selfpresentation on view throughout the gallery, one could find only three examples of a concrete, articulated self-description: “aesthetician,” “idealizer,” “GOD.” Words, however, were never Dallegret’s medium of choice. Admittedly not a man for writing, nor for reading or interviews, he nevertheless took immense pleasure in list making and in note taking, and crucially, in titling his own work. It is perhaps in his titles that we find the skeleton key to an understanding of his project, of a consistent disposition played out across time on both sides of the Atlantic. They jam together technical nomenclature and cheeky double entendre — for example, GOD, an acronym of “Go Dallegret”; the voluptuous curves of the ASS IS chair entreating viewers, in French, to sit; the CliclaCrocoTartoMatic, a machine for tripping, slapping, and/or pieing one’s interlocutors with lemon tart; R âpe à Fromage, an inhabitable cheese grater — each reminding us not to take it too seriously.

In many art forms the most poignant, if only, line of poetry can be found in the work’s title.

But with Dallegret these produce a taut ambiguity. If he was careful not to take himself too seriously, his work possesses the devoted self-seriousness of a good comedian. Is he joking or dead serious? Look as close as you like, but you’ll never find a crack in the facade.

Constructs

Working on the Fleurs des Vents proposal for Expo 67, Montreal, 1966.

With a bit of luck and online persistence, artist Justin Beal (BA ’01) stumbled upon an affordable and intact Kiik at an antique shop in Mexico City. Once commonly available at the MoMA gift shop, it has become a rare commodity. The small, polished stainlesssteel sculptural object that fits in the palm of the hand evades easy description. Dallegret enigmatically labeled it a “hand pill” for “breaking bad habits and starting good ones.”

A celebratory post on social media drew an immediate and fortuitous response from artist Kara Hamilton (MFA ’99), who counted Dallegret as a family friend growing up in Toronto. Beal and Hamilton’s subsequent conversation catalyzed the idea for the exhibition, in essence a traveling redux of GOD & CO: Beyond the Bubble, curated

by Thomas Weaver, Alessandra Ponte, and Laurent Stalder, at the Architectural Association, in London, in 2011. Over the next three years the show traveled to Zurich, Paris, and Hamilton, Ontario; nine years later Beal and Hamilton have “re-organized, amended, and adjusted” it for the Yale Architecture Gallery. In this iteration of the

exhibition, Dallegret’s first solo show on the East Coast, the cocurators — who considered themselves custodians above all — put an emphasis on the paper trail generated by the publicity surrounding Dallegret’s practice, gave the Kubaltos its exhibition debut, and brought a refurbished Tubula out of storage, suspending it from the ceiling as the centerpiece of the show, just as it was originally displayed in the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts, in Montreal, in 1968.

The works surveyed are representative of Dallegret’s most prolific years, spanning the early 1960s to early ’80s. Two outliers bookend his life’s work: a sketch for a streamlined concept car, produced while he was a student at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1957, and the ASS IS chair, designed and perfected over the course of ten years, starting in 2007.

What the selection of work makes immediately evident is the breadth of Dallegret’s output and his effortless range as an artist.

In addition to the expected inclusion of architectural plans and sections, there were designs both speculative and realized for buttons, matchbooks, lapel pins, shopping bags, bars of soap, letterheads, logos, business cards, rubber stamps, postcards, posters, currency, chairs, lighting fixtures and lamps, films, kinetic sculptures, machines of wildly varying utility, magazine illustrations, toys, photographs, costumes, paper hats, illuminated mannequins, a french curve, park benches, picnic tables, trash receptacles, billboards, cars, space stations, and intentionally inscrutable objets d’art, along with a panoply of painstakingly crafted drawings and photomontages. The imagination on display is nothing short of virtuosic. An irrepressible joie de vivre is apparent, with an intense amount of care for the craft of each work uniting the eclectic display.

Dallegret rarely composed the text that accompanied his drawings, leaving the “secondary” work of description to his editors (the exception being his collaboration with Reyner Banham, which he drew in real time with the critic). Consistent with this taciturn tendency, the exhibition was marked by a striking lack of explanatory text. Aside from an introductory panel and a brief exhibition pamphlet authored by Beal, all original drawings and objects on display were left to speak for themselves, contextualized through proximity, sparse labels noting titles and dates, and vitrines displaying publications alongside related photos and ephemera. As Dallegret once articulated, his original drawings for Art in America were best understood alongside the publications they were reproduced and circulated in. The curators took his cue by presenting this documentary footprint side by side with the related full-scale originals.

Suspended in the middle of the spacious double-height gallery was Dallegret’s Tubula, a prototype of an “automobile immobile,” at once hulking and weightless, with comically oversize rubber wheels. His zodiac of Astrological Automobiles received its proper due too, occupying a full wall. The orthogonal nooks and crannies of Rudolph’s gallery suited Dallegret’s flights of fancy. Tucked in a far corner was a curious, colorful trunk that rewarded the patient visitor with its case covers splayed open to reveal Dallegret’s design for Palais Métro, a proposed “Fun Palace à la Cedric Price,” meant to occupy a former convention center in the heart of Montreal. Weaving between spacious and compressed gallery zones, between full-size drawings and their scaled-down reproductions, the visitor had the distinct sense of being fully immersed in Dallegret’s universe.

Rarely does an exhibition’s content fit its surroundings so well as here, like the sharply tailored suit of an eccentric.

Writing in the exhibition catalog, Beal notes Dallegret’s iterative way of working, of recycling and extending the same forms and motifs again and again, akin to a running joke tested in every context until it runs out of steam. Dallegret’s work is rarely intended for a single use. It offers provocations over answers. If there is an antagonist providing friction in his work, it is perhaps the constraints and limitations of whatever constitutes common sense, the rational, and the everyday in the prevailing imaginary.

Dallegret is openly hostile to Cartesian logic, but like any artist, he is a bundle of contradictions. Despite his future-focused obsessions and early adoption of new technologies, Dallegret’s tool of choice remained the notoriously difficult to master German-made Pelikan Graphos fountain pen, an enduring classic of the 1930s.

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Still the whimsicality of Dallegret’s work remains the source of its strength and enduring appeal. Its limitations and offerings might have been best summed up in a letter by his oft-editor and friend Peter Blake written to Anne Brodzky, then editor of artscanada, for a 1972 issue on Dallegret’s catalog: There are some people, like Bucky Fuller, for example, who make you look at the world around you in a totally unexpected and rather unhinging way — the world around you, from a toothpick to an atom bomb. François is another. François’ world is a world of surprise and pleasure and delight, that I did not know until we became friends. I think that François Dallegret is, probably, unemployable in that world. Tant pis for him — more so for our world (it could, I think, benefit considerably from his unlimited imagination).

Installation view of Tubula, Saidye Bronfman Center, Montreal, 1968. Photograph by Richard Nickel.

A typical drawing took him three to four months to complete and was composed on a homemade, oversize drafting table. He discovered the ideal medium in India ink on vellum or acetate, due to the ability to revise a drawing by scratching off errant lines after they had dried on the brittle substrate.

In the show Dallegret’s own timeworn Graphos pen, complete with a variety of rusted nibs and an inscribed case, sat humbly in a peripheral vitrine surrounded by the work it brought to life, serving to remind viewers that every image is ultimately a construction.

Despite his formal training, Dallegret has never fully identified as an architect.

There is something uncomfortable about the word. He is known and most legible in architectural circles as the draftsman who provided the striking visuals accompanying Banham’s now seminal essay “A Home Is Not a House,” published in the April 1965 issue of Art in America. It is often erroneously presumed that the collaboration launched his career. By the time Dallegret had washed up on the shores of New York City from Paris in 1963, working on the article’s illustrations from his accommodations at the Hotel Chelsea, he was a known and well-connected figure in the world of contemporary European art. Shortly after graduating from the École des Beaux-Arts, Dallegret showed his Astrological Automobiles at the fabled Iris Clert Gallery, a short-lived but now legendary venue for which watershed exhibitions were the routine. Dallegret charmed the Parisian scene with apparent ease, counting Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Salvador Dalí, the Vicomtesse de Noailles, architects Peter Blake and Frederick Kiesler, and photographers Harry Shunk and János Kender among his friends. This fast track to prominence may have unwittingly triggered his expatriation. In Dallegret’s recollection, “Paris, and ultimately France, just seemed like places to leave.”

After Dallegret moved to New York in 1963 his good friend Peter Blake, then editor of Architectural Forum, put him in touch with Jean Lipman, editor of Art in America.

Lipman was taken with Dallegret’s work and gave him carte blanche to contribute to the magazine at any time, pairing him with Banham for his initial job. It proved to be a natural creative partnership that blossomed into a friendship lasting well beyond “A Home Is Not a House.” It is implicit in the show title Beyond the Bubble, however, that there is more to Dallegret’s oeuvre than the depiction of a transparent polyethylene parachute bag protecting our two nude visionaries from the elements. After less than a year in New York, Dallegret decamped to Montreal to join the team preparing for Expo 67. The move proved fitting and permanent, with Dallegret a fixture of the Montreal scene ever since.

Today, in a cultural landscape oversaturated with didacticism, it’s refreshing to encounter an artist who has refused to ascribe grand narratives to their work.

This iteration of the exhibition successfully preserved Dallegret’s reputation for eschewing the discursive aspects of selfmythologizing (that need, within the Dallegret universe, might be filled more aptly by his Relationpublicomatic, 1963, a machine for public relations). Yet in some respects his deferral to others to contextualize his work in a historical or political context (claiming on several occasions that he simply had “no idea of what was going on around me”) comes across as a willing disavowal of the political.

While the 1960s boiled over, Dallegret continued to practice. Though Montreal was a boon to productivity, he observed current events at a distance. Part of the discordance entailed in situating his practice stems from the wider political ferment of the time in which his work emerged, and its inability to track neatly with most historic inflection points. A natural question any habitué of the American campus may have asked upon entering the exhibition is one now felt in the collective consciousness with exponential frequency: What is left to dredge up and wring out of the depths of secondhand perceptions of the 1960s? What is resonant in the prolonged recuperation of this era for today’s student of architecture and design?

The show was visually dazzling and conceptually playful at every turn, underlining the fact that practitioners committed to a life of experimental, independent practice are a dying breed worthy of study and recirculation. Yet while drifting from vitrine to vitrine, any contemporary practitioner could equally observe that Dallegret’s solo artistic endeavor is a largely inaccessible historical model from a bygone age. The ambition of his work is unquestionable; the anachronism lies in how carefree it is from top to bottom. Each project required generous allotments of physical space, time, financial resources, and connections to adventurous manufacturers.

In an extensive interview with Alessandra Ponte from his aforementioned retrospective, Dallegret admits to feeling ambivalence and detachment toward the politics of May 1968, the emergence of cybernetic thought, and the machinations of the Cold War as they passed him by in real time. Though he may have been deflecting timeworn subjects or simply feeling the attendant narrative fatigue of over-exalted radicality that burdens former 68ers, one takes him at his word. That he also found no shortage of time to maintain a wellknown penchant for parties, fashion, model scouting, entertaining celebrity friends, and collecting sports cars helps to round out the materialist’s portrait. It has been an enviable and beautiful life, timed by chance to be carried away on the crest of a long-vanished wave.

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Even if we take his interviews at face value, Dallegret’s work is testament enough that he was more attuned than he lets on. Consciously or not, Dallegret embodies the very spirit of Marshall McLuhan’s electronic information age, seeking technological extensions of his senses project by project. He had a new camera in tow every time you ran into him, Blake recalled. Like the Pop artists, he knew consumerism had supplanted society’s traditional structures. He was blending the natural and supernatural, exploring the spiritual dimensions of feelings, astrology, and the cosmic. This Libra’s incessant lifelong search for modes of increased creative freedom is infectious.

Frequently the bubble that is architectural practice pushes its mavericks to the periphery to toil without support in the land of the speculative and hypothetical. One of the defining aspects of a bubble is its ability to effortlessly merge with another bubble on contact to form a greater whole. Despite his early absorption into worldly inner circles, Dallegret found the center unaccommodating — a place to leave. Voluntary settlement at the periphery unlocked something in his ability to make. Like any good visionary, he attempted to produce the otherwise from within the given. By comparison, the given looms ever larger in our present moment, with disciplinarity and professionalization walling in the scope of our vocabularies, imaginations, and social relations — all while entrenching the specialized and often closed-minded as intractable “experts” in our institutions.

In this light Dallegret appears to be the only sane person in the room. But the truly inescapable question to be asked while marveling at Dallegret’s beautiful work — one that many architects have no trouble contemplating — was what kind of world would we be living in if all of us were afforded a chance to be GOD? — Anny Li is a writer and PhD student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

— Willis Kingery (MFA ’19) is a designer living in Somerville, Massachusetts.

François Dallegret, Kubaltos, 1968, acrylic and stainless steel, installation view in the Yale Architecture Gallery.

Photograph by Alexander Harding.

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Turner Brooks

The first day of class I would get the students to arrange their chairs in a circle and then take off their shoes and throw them into middle of the 7th-floor pit in an ungainly heap.

Drawing shoes has a long history at Yale.

I think shoes are a wonderful subject matter for several reasons. They have an individual portrait-like character and personality. One views their outside and inside simultaneously so the observer is dealing both with the shape of an object and its interior space.

Often making a transition between the inside and outside is a key part of the drawing.

Shoes also have a tactile presence of both softness and hardness.

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The pile of shoes is a rich subject matter as it involves the individual object and the collective herd of objects in relationship of one to another. The way they intersect and the spaces between them are as important as the objects themselves. Often the best drawings come when I tell the class to draw the shoes while looking at the shoes and not at their paper. Here the forms of the inside, outside, and in-between zones blur to become a wonderful fluid evocation of a landscape of shoes.

—Turner Brooks

Constructs

Drawing Projects

Fall 2023

School News

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News from the Yale Center for Ecosystems in Architecture As the Yale Center for Ecosystems in Architecture (CEA) enters its fifth year, the organization continues to celebrate the expanded realization of its mission goals and their dissemination among an ever-widening global audience.

Alumni and faculty gave Turner Brooks a standing ovation in Hastings Hall on April 22. Photograph by Benjamin Piascik.

Turner Brooks On Saturday, April 22, alumni gathered from around the United States and beyond, and from class years ranging from 1965 to 2025, to celebrate the 40-year teaching career of Turner Brooks (BA ’65, MArch ’70). Attendees started off in the fourth-floor pit of Paul Rudolph Hall, where they were asked to take off their shoes and throw them in a pile in the middle of the paprika carpet. Then they were asked to draw the pile in an exercise modeled after Brooks’s course “Drawing Projects.”

Afterward alumni filed down to a packed Hastings Hall to hear heartfelt tributes to Brooks by faculty, alumni, and current students. Speakers included Jonathan Bolch (MArch ’99), Katie Colford (BA ’16, MArch ’22), Russell Katz (MArch ’96), Christina Zhang (BA ’17, MArch ’23), J. T. Toews (BA ’98, MArch ’03), Trattie Davies (BA ’94, MArch ’04), Kent Bloomer (BFA ’59, MFA ’61), Peggy Deamer, Dean Berke, and graduating architecture majors from Yale College.

Andrew Benner (MArch ’03) introduced a custom cocktail in honor of Brooks, a variation of the Old Pal containing whisky, dry vermouth, and the local aperitivo Bruto Americano. The audience was immensely moved by the event, while Brooks felt that one of his daughters summed it up very well in a comment to a friend: “I always knew dad was a little weird, but I did not know others thought so too.”

Brooks examines a model circa 1990.

Brooks started teaching at YSoA in 1982 and became known for his undergraduate studio courses that started off with a signature project, the Dominant Void — inherited in 1967 from his mentor and teacher Kent Bloomer — in which students create what Brooks calls “full-scale objects that are celebrating the fullness of space. You walk amongst them, and it’s an amazing experience of these vibrating and palpitating forces all around you.” He taught for many years in the first two classes of graduate school and gave several independent third-year studios. He also taught the seminar “Drawing Projects,” in which students choose a topic to develop and evolve over the course of the semester.

Brooks is a principal of Turner Brooks Architects, based in New Haven. Established in Starksboro, Vermont, in 1972, the firm initially designed (and often built) small houses and community facilities local to the area. The office’s more recent work includes a building that is to house a “trapezium” for the practice, teaching, and performance of circus arts in

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Brattleboro, Vermont; a new arts program facility, including a theater, on the campus of the Burgundy Farm Country Day School, in Alexandria, Virginia; and a house in Lake Placid, New York. Completed in last decade is a new Community Building at the Cold Spring School, in New Haven, and a house in the Catskills for two geologists and their family. Past projects include houses, mostly in the New England area, and institutional work such as the Cushing Collection at the Yale School of Medicine, a small museum and archive exhibiting the work and collections of pioneering brain surgeon Dr. Harvey Cushing; a new rural campus that includes dorms and community teaching facilities at an institution for the treatment of children with autism spectrum disorder in Harris, New York; student housing at Marlboro College, in Vermont; the Gilder Boathouse for Yale University; the Richard W. Woolworth Library of the Stonington Historical Society; and the Gates Center for the College of the Atlantic, in Bar Harbor, Maine. The monograph Turner Brooks: Work was published in 1995. His work has been featured in books and magazines domestically and abroad and in exhibitions at Middlebury College, Hampshire College, and Yale School of Architecture. He has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Graham Foundation, a Mid-Career Rome Prize Fellowship in 1984, and the Sidonie Miskimin Clauss ‘75 Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities in 2015 at Yale College, the only member of the YSoA faculty to ever receive this honor.

Brooks congratulated by Will Sheridan (MArch ‘14).

Photograph by Benjamin Piascik.

As the lead author, CEA (along with the United Nations Environment Programme) brought together industrial and academic partners from six continents for the report Building Materials and the Climate: Status and Solutions, published by the Global Alliance of Buildings and Construction. Yale CEA is the first organization from the architectural community to provide such authorial leadership in this semiannual publication with global impact, through key contributions from its founding director, Anna Dyson (MArch ’96); Yale faculty members Mae-Ling Lokko, Barbara Reck, and Mohamed Aly Etman; former Yale postdoctoral fellow Naomi Keena; and doctoral researcher Christina Ciardullo. The report identifies the fundamental role of building materials in the production of planetary carbon emissions, the integral importance of whole-life-cycle approaches to decarbonization, strategies of reuse and circularity, shifting to bio-based materials, the improvement of conventional materials and processes, and the importance of implementing appropriate assessment tools and policies to promote decarbonization. The publication will be presented in full at Climate Week NYC, in September 2023.

Leadership in this arena reestablishes CEA’s commitment to its core collaborative ambition to connect scientific inquiry with the aesthetic, social, and conceptual aspirations of architecture. It also emphasizes the importance of active political engagement beyond the traditional domains of architecture in order to radically transform the design of energetic and material systems, buildings, and infrastructures while understanding the effects of these elements on the geobiosphere at large.

In 2022 Anna Dyson, Hines Professor of Sustainable Architectural Design at the Yale Schools of Architecture (YSoA) and Environment (YSE), and Mohamed Aly Etman, Senior Research Scientist, presented research at the United Nations COP27 Conference on Climate Change, in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, and they will lead the Yale CEA delegation at the upcoming COP28 Conference in Dubai. In the past academic year Dyson has been a featured presenter at the Design for Freedom Summit at Grace Farms, at the Yale Club, and in the YSE Biomes series. She presented the Abend Family evening lecture at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. Dyson will be a featured speaker at “Leave No One Behind,” the UIA World Congress of Architects 2023, in Copenhagen.

Our faculty has been joined this year by assistant professor Mae-ling Lokko, founder of Willow Technologies, based in Accra, Ghana. Ongoing exhibitions of her work are on display at the Serralves Foundation in Porto, Portugal, and at the Museum of the Future, in Dubai. Lokko has recently published papers in Energies and e-flux Architecture, and has spoken at a number of global forums, including COP27 and the RICS World Built Environment Forum. She was a featured speaker in the Architectural League’s series “Field to Form,” at the panel “Yale for Humanity: Cities and Climate Solutions,” and at the 2023 Design for Freedom Summit at Grace Farms. Lokko was joined by faculty lecturer Mohamed Aly Etman in taking a group of YSoA students to explore Ghana for the technology and practice seminar “Soil Sisters.”

Our doctoral researchers, current PhD candidates, and students in the Ecosystems in Architectural Sciences PhD track have also been active in publications, presentations, and exhibitions.

Phoebe Mankiewicz recently published a paper on active green wall bioremediation

Constructs

performance in Energy & Buildings and presented an interuniversity collaborative paper on behalf of an interdisciplinary group of coauthors at the IAQ 2020 (2022) ASHRAE Conference, in Athens, Greece.

She also presented interdisciplinary collaborative research papers on microbiome sampling, at the 2022 NIST-Hosted Workshop on Standards for Microbiome and Multi’Omics Measurements, in Denver, Colorado, and on “indoor exposome,” with fellow first coauthor Elizabeth Lin, at the International Society of Exposure Science 2022 conference iin Lisbon, Portugal.

Mandi Pretorius presented a paper on water resources and the “Urban Domestic” at the “Precarity” doctoral conference at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. She also worked with collaborators at Arizona State University, a partner university with the NSF Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT), on laboratory testing of architectural prototypes in Tempe, Arizona. Pretorius conducted fieldwork supported by the Macmillan International Dissertation Fellowship in Cape Town, South Africa, and in the Lake Atitlán region of Guatemala’s southwestern highlands, investigating a renewable buildingintegrated approach to providing household water treatment, in collaboration with the Centro de Estudios Atitlán, at the University del Valle de Guatemala.

Christina Ciardullo was awarded this year’s AIA “Future Forward’’ grant.

Sponsored by the Large Firm Round Table and the Young Architects Forum, the grant supports early-career professionals in testing new ideas that disrupt the traditional conception of practice, process, and product in the field of architecture. Her proposal highlighted the disruptive nature of Yale CEA’s perspective on shifts in the professional practice of architecture, claiming that in order to meet our growing responsibilities to the environment, the profession of architecture needs to support visionary design with emerging skills in evidence-based practice. Ciardullo cited the specific implementation of aspirational “sustainable” systems such as green roofs and living walls that risk elimination due to financial and knowledge barriers for young practitioners.

Seth Embry’s project Carrion Heights, produced for Ariane Lourie Harrison’s class “Feral Surfaces,” was featured in the MODEL Barcelona Architectures Festival and selected for publication in Retrospecta.

He will be exhibiting his work for Anna Dyson’s doctoral prototyping seminar at the triennial UIA World Architecture Congress for its 75th anniversary in Copenhagen, Denmark, and leading the Yale School of Architecture student delegation to the event.

We would like to welcome incoming students Ina Dajci and Laetitia Morlie, who will be joining us in the fall.

— Seth Embry is a third-year PhD student and doctoral researcher at Yale Center for Ecosystems in Architecture.

Anna Dyson and Mohamed Aly Etman presented at the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh in November 2022.

Feels Like Summer: The Situated Exuberance of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale If architecture doesn’t serve feelings, it serves a psychosis.

—Rhael “LionHeart” Cape, from the video installation Those With Walls for Windows A joyous refuge from Venice’s blazing sun, this year’s Biennale invited us to celebrate architecture’s disciplinary breadth. Nestled within the city’s intimate residential streets — though gated behind guarded turnstiles — a room awaiting us at the entrance of the Arsenale was completely enveloped in a vivid, yet serene, blue. Expecting black text on white walls, we were completely entranced by its meditative atmosphere.

This vestibule physically and mentally prepared us to be fully engaged in what lay ahead by relieving any assumptions about the exhibition we had formed based on headlines and hearsay. Portraying the “Blue Hour” of photography, it symbolized a beautiful moment of transition highlighting color contrasts otherwise invisible, just as the Biennale aimed to bring light to the stories and people sidelined by the discipline. Curated by Lesley Lokko, The Laboratory of the Future served as a platform for highlighting the critical global issues of decolonization and decarbonization. Lokko went beyond the established narratives of the Western canon with a special focus on Africa and the African diaspora.

Many current faculty and alumni from Yale were invited to participate in the main exhibition as well as the national pavilions.

Given the large number of school affiliates, this review focuses on some of the most essential themes: decolonization, African architecture, place-specificity, and housing.

Ana María Durán Calisto, Daniel Rose (1951) Visiting Assistant Professor and principal of Estudio A0, together with Waorani artist Manuela Omari Ima and YSoA students from her research seminar “Agroecological Urban Constellations of Pre-Columbian Amazonia,” exhibited embroidered drawings depicting “ancient Amazonian agroecological urbanisms.”

The work, titled Surfacing — The Civilised Agroecological Forests of Amazonia, was also accompanied by a soundscape completed in collaboration with the Tiwino and Tepapare Waorani communes. The drawings challenged Eurocentric methods of cartography using their materiality and representational techniques, while reevaluating conventions of urban planning in light of recent discoveries using LiDAR. Mabel O. Wilson, Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor, in partnership with J. Meejin Yoon and Eric Höweler, exhibited unknown, unknown: A Space of Memory.

The project honored contributions of the unnamed members of the enslaved community who constructed, labored, and lived at the University of Virginia from 1817 to 1865. Largely left out of archival ledgers, wills, and letters, they were identified by the dehumanizing descriptor “unknown.” The installation evoked the alienation enslaved laborers faced with a rhythmic hymn that repeated “unknown, unknown,” while a projection split across staggered fabric surfaces recalled the domestic labor of Black women. Visitors were invited to walk inside and become immersed within the projected fragments of archival material.

In Africa Conservation Effort/All-Africa Protoport (ACE/AAP), Visiting Professor Olalekan Jeyifous painted a different future for Africa, one in which the “imperialist infrastructures” that exploited the people and resources of the continent were deconstructed. The project, in line with Afrofuturism, imagined a thriving Africa at the forefront of renewable energy, biodiverse agricultural technologies, and advanced transportation infrastructure.

Fall 2023

The exhibition, installed as a waiting lounge for the fictional All-Africa Protoport transit link, included drawings and models of these infrastructural nodes, along with AI-generated images illustrating their use.

The Central Pavilion focused on the work of major African architects including Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professor Francis Kéré and alumnus Issa Diabaté (MArch ’95).

Kéré Architecture’s contribution, Counteract, examined the past, present, and future of West Africa and the larger continent. His work celebrated the environmentally conscious buildings of Sudano-Sahelian architecture, using drawings and photographs to depict its characteristic construction and climatic mechanisms. In contrast, the present was represented through images from Burkina Faso, Kéré’s birthplace, where short-term mass-produced solutions have displaced sustainable long-term approaches. The studio also imagined an architectural prototype incorporating contemporary needs through a vernacular approach that is “familiar and new.” Living Differently: Architecture, Scale and the New Core, the installation by Koffi & Diabaté Architectes, focused on the village of Ebrah, near Abidjan in Cote d’Ivoire, as the firm’s “vision for the African city of tomorrow.”

Audrey Tseng Fischer (MArch ’22), of Adjaye Associates, participated in the research for the film Lost Knowledge Systems, which recounted African narratives that have been left out of the collective architectural memory. Through the lens of the materials earth, timber, thatch, and stone, the film described how precolonial African states had their own contextual “architectural morphology, iconography, and construction methodology.” Highlighting the rich cultural production based on “placemaking, identity, memory, and meaning,” the film demonstrated that designers need not rely on the Western canon for architectural inspiration.

Samar Halloum (MArch ’22) participated as research and design lead for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) National Pavilion, Aridly Abundant.

Curator Faysal Tabbarah and his team explored how the aridity of the UAE’s deserts disguise an abundance of productive materials, resources, and landscapes. Halloum represented this concept in a drawing that introduced the installation, based on her research conducted while traveling in the Hajar Mountains. The exhibition demonstrated how local or nonindustrial materials can be used for a variety of purposes, revealing a strategy that challenges mainstream and mass-produced supply chains. For example, oddly shaped rocks from Venetian quarries were combined with 3D scanning and printing techniques that outperformed lengthy and energyconsuming conventional construction processes.

The Korean pavilion, 2086: Together How, investigated the negative externalities of material progress. In Migrating Futures, critic David Eugin Moon of N H D M studied the precarious living environments of migrant workers in South Korea. The firm provided intricate drawings of these domestic spaces reflecting the migrant workers’ sense of belonging and ideas of home while highlighting their diverse aspirations beyond the labor they performed.

Dominiq Oti (MArch ’22) was selected as a participant in “The Biennale College Architettura 2023,” a new

program at the Biennale that provides a space for young students, teachers, and professionals to engage and explore common themes of decolonization and decarbonization.

Reverberating throughout the exhibition was an optimism for what the future might hold. For example, Surfacing and Counteract envisioned more environmentally conscious urbanisms, while Lost Knowledge Systems and Aridly Abundant drew on our collective memory to propose place and culturally specific designs. Lokko went beyond critiques claiming that the Biennale lacked architectural representation, delving into the very essence of architecture’s contemporary concerns. Bringing to surface and tackling the issues that lie

behind the built forms we create, the exhibition encouraged us to imagine the transformative possibilities that arise from shifting the foundational principles that have shaped our discipline and profession. With a kaleidoscope of ideas, speculations, and narratives, Lokko presented an expanded definition of architecture to the world. Aptly expressed as “an agent of change,” the exhibition inspired us to pursue change expectantly and sincerely.

The 18th Venice Biennale of Architecture, titled The Laboratory of the Future and curated by Lesley Lokko, is on view from May 20 to November 26, 2023.

— Joshua Tan (MArch ’22) and Timothy Wong (MArch ’22)

News from the Yale Urban Design Workshop It’s been a busy period for the Yale Urban Design Workshop (YUDW). Building upon 30 years of planning, advocacy, and action in the Dwight neighborhood of New Haven, YUDW has embarked on a new project, “Dwight Healthy and Just,” which seeks to address long-standing environmental and health concerns in the area.

A proposal for affordable housing that emerged as part of a collaboration between Housing Clinic students and Neighborhood Housing Services in New Haven.

An air-quality monitoring network, funded by the EPA’s Environmental Justice Small Grants Program, will be deployed to provide a dataset that can be used by the community as a basis for ongoing and future planning efforts, and which will be made available through a new online gateway dedicated to neighborhood health and planning. The information gathered through this process, as well as through a series of public charrette-style activities, open houses, and walking tours, will inform a revision to the original Dwight plan that YUDW helped the neighborhood publish in 1996. In addition, YUDW will be collaborating with the Yale Center on Climate Change and Health to examine cooling strategies in Dwight, with the goal of mitigating summer heat for low-income residents who are disproportionately affected.

This part of the project has been funded separately by a grant from the Climate Impact Innovation Fund of the Yale Planetary Solutions Project and will deploy bicycle-mounted heat sensors as well as place sensors in households to create a detailed heat map of the neighborhood. The resulting primary data will provide another input to the new Dwight plan, contributing to the development and siting of specific strategies and project proposals for improving the health of area residents in relation to both urban heat and air quality.

The YUDW is also working with Niantic Main Street, a downtown revitalization organization, on a Main Street Plan for the waterfront of East Lyme, Connecticut. The YUDW will revise a plan originally published in 1997. A renewed set of principles will outline several ways to transform the town through strengthening its connection to the waterfront, creating walking and cycling routes, and building on the distinctive identity of its retail environment, all with the ambition to preserve and enhance Niantic’s unique character. The plan will include more detailed schemes for the development of an old police station by the water’s edge and for the conversion of a recently closed local cinema complex into a flexible workspace and theater venue.

In Norwich, Connecticut, the YUDW is working with Castle Church to design a public space on Broadway. Nestled between Castle

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Church and the old Del Hoff Hotel, the site, Jubilee Park, is newly framed by a colorful 50-by-50-foot mural painted by artist Ben Keller that features two important Black historical figures — James Lindsay Smith and Sarah Harris Fayerweather. The completion of the mural signaled the conversion of the site from a disused patch of land to a welcoming, celebratory space where the community can gather.

The hope is that this public space will serve as an anchor for the downtown district and inspire further improvements to this part of Norwich.

Back in New Haven, the YUDW is continuing work on the adaptive reuse of a Queen Anne Revival house, on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard, into a daycare center and affordable homes for local teachers, as well as on a master plan for the Elm City Montessori School.

Exterior stabilization work began this summer.

The second iteration of the clinic “Housing Connecticut: Developing Healthy and Just Neighborhoods,” organized by the YUDW, will take place in the Fall 2023 semester at Yale University. The workshop pairs graduate students from the School of Architecture, Law School, and School of Management with nonprofit developers to produce proposals for affordable housing. Last year the clinic resulted in three projects: a reimagining of local vernacular housing in Newhallville, an inventive ADU model on Division Street, and an ambitious mixed-use project in Fairhaven. Offered in collaboration with the Department of Housing and Commissioner Seila Mosquera-Bruno, and supported by a grant from the SNF Fund for the Integration of Theory and Practice, the projects emerging from the clinic have the potential to progress into the pilot phase, where they would be implemented with support from the YUDW. One of the initial three projects, including eight units of affordable housing, is now moving toward final design and construction.

Last semester the YUDW was pleased to welcome Matthew Rosen as Assistant Director.

He holds a master’s in Architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and a BS in Architecture with Honors from the University at Buffalo. He will coordinate several of the YUDW’s projects, in addition to teaching at the School of Architecture.

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Post-Professional Thesis Students in the MArch II Post-Professional degree program now have the opportunity to engage in extensive independent work during their time at YSoA. The program has been an important opportunity for architects who already have a professional degree, and in many cases are already licensed, to consider their role and agency within the profession in innovative ways. It allows them to explore how they can reposition themselves in the field and stake a leadership trajectory as they consider new forms of inquiry through design research projects. graduation prize, the Independent Design Research Award, recognizes an outstanding independent project. The inaugural award went to Nohar Zask Agadi (MArch ’23) for Blue Zone — Contact Zone, advised by Ana María Durán Calisto. The following is his description of a process for mapping longevity:

Jahaan Scipio (MArch ‘23) presents (AN)OTHER ATLAS. Photograph by Sang Ji Han.

The Post-Professional program is directed

by Bimal Mendis (BA ’98, MArch ’02).

Over the past year he has refined and augmented the existing curriculum, working with Sunil Bald, associate dean and head of the Curriculum Committee, and various other faculty members integral to the program. In the new sequence, the first year will focus on research through two preparatory design research seminars, led

by Anthony Acciavatti, Diana Balmori Assistant Professor, in the fall, and Aniket Shahane (MArch ’05) and Ana María Durán Calisto, Daniel Rose (1951) Visiting Assistant Professor, in the spring. Students will identify their sites and subjects, test methods and media of inquiry, and develop abstracts and detailed project proposals.

The second year will facilitate exploration, design, and dissemination through a yearlong design research studio allowing students to develop their subjects in greater depth. Within this common framework firstyear students will take advanced design studios together with a broad range of elective seminars at and beyond the school in support of their projects.

The incoming MArch II students (class of 2025) will follow the revised curriculum, and the yearlong studio will be offered for the first time in 2024–25. Students currently develop their projects over the program’s four semesters, beginning with two preparatory seminars and culminating in an independent studio in the final semester.

Last spring each student worked with a faculty advisor within the framework of the design research studio coordinated by Bimal Mendis, together with Emily Abruzzo and Brennan Buck, assisted by Iris Giannakopoulou Karamouzi (PhD ’25).

The independent projects ran the gamut from Deconstructivist academies on the Tiber to deep mappings of BedfordStuyvesant and from the future of fish hatcheries to spa architecture. A new

In 1973 National Geographic named Vilcabamba, Ecuador, a ‘Blue Zone’ and an epicenter of longevity. The town has since fostered a selfsustaining migration stream of curious individuals seeking spiritual rebirth.

Rather than being politically extractive, foreign residents in Vilcabamba have integrated with the local community via Contact Zones — rituals or places where expatriates and local populations converge while ecologies coexist.

Such confluences or cultural-exchange junctions in Vilcabamba are aligned with the social practices of communitymaking, nutrition, and rituals, manifesting a contemporary reflection on sacred traditions. The project unfolds Andean landscapes to reveal the sources of reemerging cultural mythologies. To facilitate an understanding of the cross-cultural exchange, the thesis presents a contact zone of scholarship drawing the cartographic encounters of technocratic choreography and native communicentric intelligence. This documentarian analysis of territorial relationships along the Andean mountain range sets Vilcabamba as a model for community resilience and a testament to cultural genealogy.

Traditions are reimagined here by lifestyle migrants who perform a symbiotic integration with the local community and wish to understand and implement the Andean way of life. I will argue that the migrant’s ability to use communicentric languages while engaging with foreign communities keeps legacies alive and shapes a profound definition of longevity. The technocratic definition of Blue Zones is thus challenged by understanding cross-cultural communication as a threshold to admitting both Eurocentric and Indigenous ideas of well-being, building on the binary of nature and culture to propose an alternative public connection with territorial heritage.

Jun Nam (MArch ‘23) presents When Is a Kitchen Not a Kitchen? Photograph by Sang Ji Han.

Anamnesis, The Ministry of Life, a project on the future of Vatican City by Max Kronauer (MArch ‘23) pinned up in the fourth floor pit. Photograph by Sang Ji Han.

Student Exhibitions

Traveling Circus Tent

Postcards from Sharjah

January 16–February 15, 2023

February 21–March 31, 2023 Curated by Reem Khorshid (MArch ’24), Julie Chan (MArch ’24), and Annika Babra (MArch ’24), Postcards from Sharjah was an extension of Khorshid’s research on the history of modernization in the United Arab

Sally Chen (MArch ‘23) presents Looking Down We See Up. Photograph by Sang Ji Han.

Constructed by Devin Jernigan (PhD student), Beth Jernigan, and Rong Chen, Traveling Circus Tent displayed a meticulous recreation of the eponymous concessions-oriented structure circa the 1920s. The tent was explored as part of Jernigan’s practice of archiving circus artifacts, and the temporal nature of the student exhibition allowed Jernigan to tap into the original purpose of circus tents as disposable mobile structures that helped to extend the reach of circus entertainment to the American hinterlands. The team used archival documents and historical photos from the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art and the Tibbals Circus Collection.

Ray Hautamaki, an awning maker in Sarasota, Florida, and Hellar Armbruster, of Armbruster Manufacturing Company, were consulted for historical accuracy.

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Constructs

Postcards from Sharjah.

Emirates for the book Building Sharjah (Birkhäuser, 2021). In particular, the exhibition explored the city’s oil boom, considering the built environment and how it became part of the broader culture of the place.

Drawing upon postcards, archival drawings, and photographs (both archival and personal) that document architectural projects in the postboom period, the show offered an intimate glimpse into the ways the people of Sharjah encountered and perceived the social and urban changes of their time. The human scale of the displays invited exhibition visitors to flip through family albums and books to experience this personal urban history with the city’s inhabitants.

Artificial Forest April 6–May 26, 2023 An ode to the tree curated by Owen Wang (MArch ’25), Paddy Mittag-McNaught (MArch ’25), Ariel Bintang (MArch ’23), and Val Zhao, Artificial Forest portrayed the tree at two scales: the collective (a forest), in relation to the urban and “artificial forest”; and the material (wood), in relation to the industrial and synthetic. A collection of chairs, tables, frames, delicate sculptures, and doodads was exhibited within a gridded “forest” of hanging lumber lights, with each piece — whether sculpture, furniture, or other object — displayed alongside poems written from its perspective.

— Livy Li (MArch ’25)

that speak to the type of workplace needed in an urban development today.

Students in the studio identified potential urban business models that address future relationships between places of production and consumption. They looked at comparable waterfront development projects and addressed issues including flood mitigation and environmental remediation in their proposals.

The publication was recognized by the AIGA’s 50 Books 50 Covers of 2022 competition as a winner in the covers category, and was designed by Manuel Miranda (MFA ’05), senior critic in Graphic Design at the School of Art, and Fred Pirlot. As an analogy to the changing nature of urban industrial space, the book design incorporates a bold and custom typeface that references digital and industrial forms.

Housing Redux: Alternatives for NYC’s Housing Projects

Artificial Forest.

YSoA Books 2022–23 I, Like Many Things

This book, an extension of a student exhibition at the School of Architecture, is edited by Diana Smiljković (MArch ’22), Gustav Nielsen (MArch ’22), Rachael Tsai (MArch ’22), and Jack Rusk (MArch ’22, MEM ’22) and designed by Nick Massarelli (MFA ’21) and Luiza Dale (MFA ’21).

engage with, push back on, and negotiate the spaces we inhabit, consciously or not, expanding our collective field of action. I, Like Many Things insists on the critical interdependency of all social, political, and environmental struggles and attempts to maneuver ambiguities, complexities, imaginaries, and chaos as stepping stones toward more integrative and sensitive spatial practices. It can be read as an unreliable guide to alternative methods in many directions.

The Innovative Urban Workplace: Designing for the Future at the Brooklyn Navy Yard

Distributed by Actar Publishers I, Like Many Things is a story of contemporary life and architecture that begins with everyday domestic practices and the notion of “home” as a literal (and literary) space — a space that simultaneously structures and is structured by our relationship to each other and the world. To tell this story, twenty-six authors from far-flung fields and geographies collectively narrate four fluid chapters in a thick history of the present.

Across four chapters and three visual catalogs I, Like Many Things presents anecdotal stories, fictions, academic research, poetry, and visual essays. One chapter explores nascent and invasive virtual worlds. Another hones in on ongoing ecological collapse and climate disaster. A third chapter finds ground in social movements and political organizing, while a fourth ponders selfhood, imagination, and the possibilities of “off-time.” As timely distractions between chapters, catalogs present past inquiries by us and open call participants.

I, Like Many Things is for those to whom the pandemic was an exercise in spatial design, those who consider themselves architects or designers, and those who do not. It is for those of us who

Fall 2023

Abby Hamlin, the Edward P. Bass Visiting Distinguished Architecture Professor, with Dana Tang (MArch ’95) and Andrei Harwell (MArch ’06) Edited by Nina Rappaport and Stella Xu (MArch ’21) and designed by Manuel Miranda Practice Distributed by Actar Publishers The Innovative Urban Workplace documents the Edward P. Bass Distinguished Visiting Architecture Fellowship studio with Abby Hamlin, founder of Hamlin Ventures, Dana Tang, architect and partner at Gluckman Tang Architects, and Andrei Harwell, senior critic in architecture at Yale. The studio investigated the role of the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York City in order to understand and meet the BNY’s mission and design distinctive solutions

Nnenna Lynch, Edward P. Bass Distinguished Visiting Architecture Fellow with James von Klemperer, Hana Kassem, and Andrei Harwell Edited by Nina Rappaport and Saba Salekfard (MArch ’22) and designed by Manuel Miranda Practice

predicted economic, political, and environmental futures. Thus, whereas utopian architects of the past each sought to impose a singular future through visionary architectural form, architects of today must reconcile between the multiple futures projected by hired specialists, live modeling software, climate-change prognoses, and financial markets. Perspecta 55 aims to undertake this much-needed analysis of contrasting techniques of prediction and investigating architecture’s relationship to these conflicting visions of the future.

Futures Index gathers together contributions from the fields of finance, climate, security, and computation to unearth the particular disciplinary histories and social values that underlie future projection. They identify eight futurological modes with direct impact on architectural practice: the hypothetical speculation of scenario planning, the training drills of disaster preparation, the logic of resisting a certain future evident within resiliency, the imaginings of science fiction, the risks and profits of the financial futures market, techniques of building information modeling and simulation, the algorithmic prediction involved in data mining, and the future-reversing logic of repair.

In investigating and testing practices of future prediction, Perspecta 55 hopes to empower architecture to address its uncertain, contested futures so that it may successfully reconcile and articulate its own future.

What about Learning?

Distributed by Actar Publishers The book Housing Redux focuses on ways to reinvent public housing in New York City through a series of design projects produced in an advanced studio that integrates form with social programs for the residents. Nnenna Lynch, housing developer and Edward P. Bass Distinguished Visiting Professor, with architects Jamie von Klemperer and Hana Kassem, of Kohn Pederson Fox, and Andrei Harwell, senior critic in architecture, led the studio, focusing on the redesign of the New York City Housing Authority’s Washington Houses, in East Harlem. Investigating the relationship between housing, equity, health, and community, the students developed comprehensive frameworks for the apartment buildings, comprised of three connected superblocks equivalent to seven city blocks. The concepts focused on restitching the project into the city street grid by adding new built fabric that would allow the Modernist towers-in-the park to connect with public streets. Some found ways to keep the superblock with interventions to support the community at different scales and family structures.

Urban farms and community facilities as well as recreation spaces were included as a way to reorient public housing with a range of interventions for care, health, and equity.

Perspecta 55: Futures Index Edited by Lani Barry (MArch ’19), Jeffrey Liu (MArch ’19), Nicholas Miller (MArch ’19), Matthew Wagstaffe (BA ’10, MArch ’19), and Ethan Zisson (MArch ’19) Designed by Kyla Arsadjaja (MFA ’20) and Julia Schafer (MFA ’20) Distributed by MIT Press Architecture is fundamentally a practice of predicting the future. In designing spaces that will endure for decades, architects must reconcile their visions of future living with

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Deborah Saunt, Saarinen Visiting Professor Edited by David Grant and Saba Salekfard (MArch ’22) Distributed by Actar Publishers What about Learning? focuses on how architectural education and learning at large faced ongoing disruptions and pressures under the COVID-19 pandemic, in terms of disembodied learning and a renewed sense of civic participation, along with an increasing awareness of how our relationship to the environment is so critical to life at home. These issues led the students to consider a twofold architectural question: What is the best site for learning today? What alternative forms of learning and exchange could it nurture?

The research came out of a studio led

by Deborah Saunt, of DSDHA, based in London with Timothy Newton and Jane Wong.

A collective analysis of the Yale School of Architecture’s changing conditions, from its physical site to a virtual presence and networks, in parallel with research into alternative learning models such as University of the Underground and the London School of Architecture, served as the basis for critique and the making and unmaking of a curriculum in the students’ studio projects. The design projects drew from lockdown and the need for different spatial potentials for learning in sites of personal significance. Talks from a symposium with guests invited from different fields — from activism and planning to pedagogy, triggering a cross-disciplinary exchange about learning and the built environment — are also included.

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Spring 2023 Events Lectures this past spring ranged across disciplines including architecture, landscape architecture, interior design, geography, and graphic design.

Ann Beha Straight Up, with a Twist: Clarity, Intention, Delivery Gordon H. Smith Lecture January 26

Mabel Wilson Ken Tadashi Oshima, Can We Forget?: A Memorial to Momoyo Enslaved Laborers Kaijima, and Sunil Bald January 12

Mabel O. Wilson, Spring 2023 Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor, professor in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University, and director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies, discussed the key role architecture plays in memorializing communities and histories of enslaved people. Wilson began by delving into the significance of site analysis and context in intentional architecture, as in one of her most recent works, a memorial for the enslaved laborers at the University of Virginia (UVA). Understanding historical context was crucial to answering her primary question, “Can we retrieve in the memorial for UVA’s enslaved community what remains dormant — the purchase or claim of their lives on the present — without committing further violence in our own act of architectural and spatial narration of the past?”

After analyzing UVA’s archives, Wilson and her team — architects Meejin Yoon and Eric H ö weler, landscape architect Gregg Bleam, artist Eto Otitigbe, and community facilitator Frank Dukes — discovered that of the estimated 4,000 enslaved laborers who worked, lived, and slept at UVA, 3,111 of them were completely unnamed and undocumented. This added a more complex challenge for the monument’s construction since the new objectives included “to build places for remembering” those who remain unknown. Wilson and her team came up with the idea of using ridges in the stone to symbolize whiplashes for every slave who worked on the plantation. These lash marks, embedded in the rock, collected water so that when it rained the lashes would seem to weep, viscerally demanding to be acknowledged.

Wilson and her team also wove features with even deeper nuance into the memorial. “We created a timeline that centered the experience of the enslaved community, juxtaposing lives where people learned and loved within a landscape of toil, tyranny, and trauma.” Furthermore, through a “custom parametric carving technique used to make an image visible from certain vantage points through the linear carving of stone,” the team portrayed the eyes of Isabella Gibson, the only enslaved person from UVA whose story was known. “We strove to create a memorial that abandoned grand stories and instead employed different modes of image and mark making to tell and also not tell, situated in fragmented narratives of a community’s loss, its perseverance, and its possibility.”

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Found in Translation January 13 Ken Tadashi Oshima, professor of architecture history, theory, and design at the University of Washington; Momoyo Kaijima, founding member of Atelier Bow Wow; and Sunil Bald, founding member of SUMO Studio, discussed the effects and impacts of translating Japanese culture in the context of the Western Hemisphere.

Oshima began the conversation by asking the question “Is something found or lost in translation?” As a case study, he used the Japanese House “made of wood and paper” installed in the sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1954–55. At the direction of Arthur Drexler, it was taken from its original site and used to illustrate the relevance of traditional Japanese architecture, with its tectonic structure and flexible floor plans, to the Modernist idiom.

Oshima clarified that despite mirroring the experience of “going to Japan,” with viewers getting a glimpse into the rock garden, entering the house, and taking off their shoes, “if you look down in the reflection of the garden pond you would see the surrounding skyscrapers of New York.” Bald provided an alternative perspective, noting how the reconstruction of Japanese architecture in the West, like at the farm of Antonin and Noemi Raymond or at the scale of wood joinery, found new functionality in domestic spaces.

“Understanding how things join together becomes a medium for people coming together to build a house, which is what we saw at MoMA … a shift into looking at the rural landscape and how things begin to interlock, not just as a metaphor for people coming together but as an actual vehicle for bringing people together.”

Kaijima concluded the conversation by reflecting on how the cultural composition of a country impacts both its material architecture and design style, as well as how different spaces are used.

In her examination of architectural development in Switzerland (she also teaches at ETH Zurich), she saw that building together came to be a way to construct a national culture between the various linguistic groups in the country.

She spoke about links between geography and building culture, noting that Japan’s temperate climate means that more cedar is used as opposed to Swiss pine, which requires a different type of joinery and thus a different way of working together on a construction site.

Ann M. Beha, founder of Ann Beha Architecture (now Annum Architecture), Spring 2023 Robert A.M. Stern Visiting Professor, and recipient of the Boston Society for Architecture’s Award of Honor and Women in Design Award, discussed the importance of clarity, delivery, and intention in architecture. Beha began by presenting a pair of recent preservation projects — the University of Chicago Department of Economics (formerly the Chicago Theological Seminary) and the Humanities Quadrangle at Yale (formerly the Hall of Graduate Studies) — that exemplified the importance of engaging with a site’s context and integrating new elements sensitively.

Her approach to these two projects was “to honor the buildings while making everyone feel welcome.” To accomplish her objective Beha added modern lighting and restoration, “unveiling the quality of the building” while redesigning foot traffic and movement to “bring life into unused spaces.”

Beha then explored a different pair of projects — the Museum of Folk Art, in Shelburne, Vermont, and Greenwich Academy, in Greenwich, Connecticut — that displayed the importance of balancing the preservation of heritage and the implementation of modern functionality in architectural design.

In both projects Beha had to maintain the style established by surrounding buildings while incorporating the wants and needs of users in her design. She explained that as a result of this careful balance, the architecture did not have to sacrifice its historical heritage to accommodate modern necessities.

Beha’s third pair of projects — the Emma Willard School, in Troy, New York, and the Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción Community Center, in the South End of Boston — demonstrated the uniting ability of community-curated architecture. In these two projects Beha displayed the power of the “architectcitizen” who unites communities by involving local stakeholders in discussions about function, appearance, and context. She explained that bespoke vessels have both enhanced longevity and enhanced impact on others.

The ability to appreciate architecture and its surroundings more completely comes through “moving forward by sharing your passion with other people.”

— to demonstrate how “the particular is both process and property that does not always resonate as idiosyncratic but instead oscillates between forms of contextual legibility that share equal favor with the obvious.”

Norman and Kelly explored the manifestation of particularity in modern spaces through their work in urban settings. They first presented their redesign of Notre, a high-end fashion retail store in the West Loop of Chicago, with “the liability of the awful lot being its lack of perceptible entry or starting point to manage its dislocation as well as being a space that preceded inclusive design.”

Their solution was the stair-ramp (“stramp”), which “foregrounds a delayed entry or perhaps a double entry … signaling the setback entry or starting point of the commercial experience,” situating the shop as a series of rooms nested one structural bay away from the street. This design move of connecting and isolating spaces within a larger space was also consistent in several of their other urban projects, including the exhibition design for Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and their lobby redesigns for Beacon Capital Partners at 190 LaSalle Street and 303 East Wacker Drive.

Lastly Norman and Kelly illuminated the way particular furniture choices can transform spaces through a coffee cart in the skyscraper at 515 North State Street, designed by Kenzo Tange, and a Chicago apartment within a concrete tower. The coffee cart’s “abstracted metallic form is designed to imbue the lobby and adjacent public plaza with the image of movement,” while the primary staircase in the apartment “provides a seamless connection to assimilate the transition in form and finish between the two levels.” In both projects Norman and Kelly illuminate the ability of the particular to enhance a space and divert “attention to more immediate histories or different attitudes toward the existing history that might be more accessible to someone who doesn’t necessarily work in those spaces.”

Nontsikelelo Carrie Norman Mutiti and Thomas Kelly February 23

being particular February 2 Carrie Norman and Thomas Kelly, Spring 2023 Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professors and founders of Norman Kelly, recounted their exploration of architecture in pursuit of understanding, “both as a percept and as a concept, what constitutes an architecture of particularity.” They began by presenting two incorrectly designed pieces of furniture — a Victorian tea table with a vertical tabletop and an American Windsor bench that combines spliced side and frontal elevations to make the experience unnecessarily uncomfortable

Constructs

Nontsikelelo Mutiti, director of Yale’s Department of Graphic Design, reflected on her career and development in graphic design, primarily in Zimbabwe, bringing to light hidden cultures. Mutiti commenced her lecture by explaining how her upbringing shaped her career. She set the tone by first recounting sitting with her sister “between her [mother’s] legs after church and having [her] hair pulled into braided patterns so tight we all looked like we had gotten a facelift.” As Mutiti reminisced about her childhood she explained how her life could have taken a completely different course if her mother had not “told me to pursue where my talent was, in painting and in my enthusiasm for drawing.” In turn, these key moments and experiences developed Mutiti’s values as an artist and educator.

Mutiti described her core values through the words of Zimbabwean activist and novelist Yvonne Vera: “I would not write if I weren’t in search of beauty, if I was doing it only to advance a cause. I care deeply about my subjects, but I want to be consumed by figures of beauty, by story and character.

It must be about perfection. Like a basketmaker or a weaver or a hair-plaiter, you are aware of what you are trying to accomplish from the first sentence.” Mutiti reflected on how these words mirror her efforts to create art and teach graphic design in Africa, despite the lack of design education in the schools as well as the scarcity of graphicdesign technology.

Mutiti also demonstrated how she braided Zimbabwean culture into her work.

One example of this is in her project “Beautiful Words Are Subversive,” where she focuses attention on “laws that make writers seem criminal and the minister of police own the handcuffs of the nation.”

To combat this enforced silence and educate others about the culture and language of Zimbabwe, Mutiti built a braided visual language, viewable at readingzimbabwe.com.

made sure to intentionally balance their client’s attention to African heritage and concern for sustainability. One way they achieved this equilibrium was by incorporating fritted glass, which reduced heat waste and cast shadows of traditional African patterns. Through their genuine effort and immense attention to detail, Caples and Jefferson’s work demonstrated how “responsibility to connect with culture does not cancel out responsibility to be good stewards of the Earth.”

Kathryn Yusoff Broken Earth & Built Earths: Architectures at an Inhuman Impasse David W. Roth and Robert H. Symonds Memorial Lecture April 6

Sara Caples and Everardo Jefferson Erasing Invisibility March 30 Sara Caples (MArch ’74) and Everardo Jefferson (MArch ’73), founders of Queensbased firm Caples Jefferson Architects, reflected on how their work connects socially disconnected people to their communities and surroundings. “We knew that we wanted to work in neighborhoods where people didn’t seem to be represented, and where the architecture didn’t seem related to its occupants. We wanted to bring our buildings and their audience into a closer relationship.”

Caples and Jefferson began their lecture by revealing that their method for finding deeper meaning and importance in architecture was not only to listen to but also to understand their clients. “When we first hear from people about what they’re looking for, as hard as we try to listen, we don’t really hear. We’ve had this experience again and again, but it takes repeated efforts, and then at some point there’s kind of a breakthrough where we start to understand our mistaken preconceptions that are preventing us from seeing, and in that moment of breaking through the work becomes deeper and hopefully more interesting.”

The first example of this in the presentation was their design of the Jennie Knauff Children’s Center, a preschool for children with HIV and AIDS, for which they converted the theater at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital. In this projec they “needed to calm down the palette because for many of these children and their families — who had many members who were ill — their lives were very disrupted, and the school, albeit in an abandoned burlesque office, was a refuge.”

Caples and Jefferson maintained the same level of attentiveness to their clients’ stories, heritage, and culture throughout the other projects they presented, including the Heritage Heath & Housing Headquarters, a Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial proposal, the Louis Armstrong House Museum, and the Queens Theatre in the Park. For the Weeksville Heritage Center (WHC), in Brooklyn, designed to celebrate the rediscovered property belonging to freed slaves known as Weeksville, Caples and Jefferson

Fall 2023

Kathryn Yusoff, professor of inhuman geography at Queen Mary University in London, began her lecture by introducing the idea of “broken earths in the context of built earth,” a revaluation of the role and impact of architecture on a macro scale. This revaluation considers that “the Anthropocene is a manifestation of colonial afterlives as well as material practices and discourses of materialisms.” In Yusoff’s larger consideration for architecture, she thinks that architects of the future can “have a restorative and reparative engagement with the past. They can remediate and refuse infrastructures of colonial renewal, and this positions architecture at a crossroads in terms of its organization of planetary states.”

By portraying the world through the geological states of “broken and built earths,” Yusoff sought to show that “geology has been socialized and the human, in turn, has been geologized. The core of this rendering is this idea of the inhuman as a new subject position of the Anthropocene that is implicated and substantiated in a long history of colonial materialism.” Yusoff explained that despite the seeming neutrality of geographic location and the materials used and chosen in architecture, their nature is intrinsically colonialist and racialized through the violence of extraction and its associated labor. She concluded that “if we think about the language of geology of natural resources, and how that stabilizes the material world and the operative zones of extraction and their subjective categories, we can presume that the world in which these geo-racial codes of values, stability, and circulation exist already incites a kind of continual renewal.” So the task for architects, it seems, is to confront the violence inherent in the production of architecture.

Ross Exo Adams Colonial Remnants of the Urban Present Myriam Bellazoug Memorial Lecture April 13 Ross Exo Adams, professor of architectural studies at Bard College, opened his lecture by acknowledging “the ongoing nature of the violence in the present … through what it fully means to be occupying unceded land.” As an urban theorist, historian, and architect, Adams has spent much of his career examining the impacts of colonialism on the present and

how colonial history manifests itself in modern urban systems. He noted how a focus on the resilience of urban environments results in “a mode of planning, aiming solely to protect the viability of the status quo.”

Adams claimed that “resilience in a capitalist world will never be for everyone” since those who are disadvantaged will never have the agency or resources of more advantaged individuals. Because of this, crises such as climate change are “ancestral catastrophes.” He explored how this crisis of urban resilience originated in recent human history and how, in his research, he kept being led back to the central question, “What is the urban?” By looking at the work of Ildefons Cerdà, Adams found that the urbe, what seemed to be a new form of the city, “was not a city at all but really a kind of spatial template on which to consecrate new relations between society and technology, nature and capital, governance and subjectivity, territory and private property, movement and security, life and labor, and others.”

Adams then analyzed how this system of management was found in the original plans of cities such as Penn’s Philadelphia, Oglethorpe’s Savannah, and Jefferson’s Land Ordinance of 1785. He concluded by explaining that because of the colonial nature of much of urban creation, it is impossible to counter the oppressive nature of cities without altering their core systems. “The making of the urban cannot be prized from the making and managing of settler colonial spaces, nor can it be understood as distinct from the creation of modern subjectivity and its racialized, gendered hierarchies, as well as its mechanistic understanding of nature as something that needs to be enclosed, controlled, and improved.”

Christine Ten Eyck The Memory of Water Timothy Egan Lenahan Memorial Lecture April 20 Christine Ten Eyck, founder of Ten Eyck Landscape Architects, began her lecture by familiarizing the audience with her mission to “connect urban dwellers with nature and one another.” This mission has been at the core of her decision making throughout her journey into practice as a landscape architect.

In Ten Eyck’s eyes, the role of a landscape architect is to “set a stage for living and experiencing life and really trying to connect people with architecture because experiences give us memories and memories form our perception of the world.”

Ten Eyck recounted an adventure along the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon as one of her main influences. It was here that she found many of the most prominent influences on her work, such as arroyos, “where all the bigger trees were and the fragrances and plant material were all so beautiful”; tinajas and huecos, with

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“inspirational layers of stone”; and the seeps and springs that act as reminders of “the Native American reverence for water.” Ten Eyck also discovered global hydrological inspirations such as Indian step-wells, which were “sanctuaries to water,” Moorish gardens possessing “visible irrigation and using the least amount of water to the most effect,” and ancient cisterns and tanks.

Through her explorations of the natural world, Ten Eyck has developed a profound understanding of how to wield water and direct its flow to enrich arid landscapes. She presented several projects that applied this mastery, including a redesign of the watercontainment systems of the Arizona State University Polytechnic campus, the creation of the Capri Event Center from the remains of a decommissioned military hangar, the transformation of the campus of the University of Texas at El Paso through geologic rainwater collection systems, the creation of the Holdsworth Center for world-class leadership training and development, and the redesign and renovation of Kingsbury Commons park, in Austin, Texas.

Shigeru Ban Balancing Architectural Works and Social Contributions Cosponsored by the Yale MacMillan Center Program on Refugees, Forced Displacement, and Humanitarian Responses (PRFDHR) and the Yale MacMillan Center Council on East Asian Studies April 24 Shigeru Ban, humanitarian, architect, and 2014 Pritzker laureate, explained his motivations in architecture through the presentation of a wide range of projects.

First he described how he started on such a unique career path: “After I spent ten years practicing, I realized that we architects are mainly working for privileged people who have money and power. But because power and money are invisible, they hire us to make a monument to show off their power to the public.” From then on Ban dedicated his practice to building for the general public and soon specialized in projects for people who had suffered from natural disasters. “When I found out that it’s not earthquakes that kill people, but the collapse of buildings, those deaths are our responsibility as architects.

I think it is our responsibility to improve living conditions even before cities are rebuilt; that is why I started working in disaster areas.”

In addition to focusing on projects that benefit others, Ban makes sure his projects benefit the environment. One example of this attentiveness is in the design and construction of the 2000 World Expo Japanese pavilion, focusing on sustainability.

Ban ingeniously designed the structure of the pavilion out of paper chips and an impermeable paper membrane so that it could be demolished and recycled after the event. His environmental concern was further displayed in projects such as the allwooden structure of the Tamedia newspaper headquarters in Switzerland, a private art museum constructed of reused shipping containers, an office in the Centre Pompidou constructed of paper chips and wooden joints, a Parisian music complex made of timber and glass, temporary shelters in Kobe constructed of plastic beer crates and paper chips, a paper-chip-and-safety-pin partition system for crowded refugee camps in Turkey, and the Mount Fuji World Heritage Center, made of bamboo and shaped like an inverted mountain.

—Eli Breyer Essiam

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Spring 2023 Studios Designing from the scale of landscapes to the detailed joinery of domestic structures, all with a strong focus on adaptive reuse.

Nikhil Makhijani (MArch ’24) The Earthbound Ruins Museum Zhu Pei, William B. and Charlotte Shepherd Davenport Visiting Professor, with Karolina Czeczek (MArch ’15), critic

students to take on recycling and adaptive reuse instead of “knee-jerk demolition without better replacements.”

La Ropa Sucia Se Lava en Casa Tatiana Bilbao, Andrei Harwell, and Iwan Baan

Seung Hyun Kim (MArch ’23) and Anna Korneeva (MArch ’24) Urban Acupuncture Stella Betts, senior critic, and Brett Schneider, critic

Architectural Design II: Collective Imagination Annie Barrett, Laura Briggs, Liz Gálvez, Talitha Liu, Joeb Moore, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, and Miriam Peterson “Collective Imagination” invited students to consider the possibilities of communal living.

Students expanded on research conducted for the 2023 Jim Vlock Building Project, using the same Fair Haven Heights lot as the site for an imaginary community of 50–150 people. The first third of the semester, titled “THEN,” comprised a series of exercises.

First students looked at two existing communal living projects and one communal act. Programs and rituals, as well as spatial and interpersonal relationships involved in communal living, were examined and then manifested in concept models, from which forms emerged that informed the students’ final projects. This was followed by a “4D section drawing” that documented the site over time.

For the second part of the semester, “NOW,” students developed communal housing for 50 inhabitants sharing a particular purpose. The final part of the semester, “NOT NOW,” challenged students to imagine their project in other worlds or at any time in the future. The students were encouraged to test the relationship and interdependence between the individual and the collective to its logical extreme (in other words, applying science fiction to an architectural studio).

Through designing the spaces, the students seemed to design the collective itself: “something we hold in common ... an amalgamation of an embodied present and a schema for a projected future.”

Architectural Design IV: City, Resilient Aniket Shahane, Anthony Acciavatti, Tei Carpenter, Alicia Imperiale, David Eugin Moon, and Alan Plattus Dispersed over six different sites, this studio was united by the theme of resiliency — “the capacity for buildings, cities, landscapes, and communities to absorb and recoil from a variety of urban problems,” especially in relation to water. Alan Plattus (BA ’76) led his students to Sarasota, Florida, where they

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were tasked with planning coastal adaptation at the regional scale, zooming in slowly from the Gulf of Mexico to Sarasota and the campus of New College. Alicia Imperiale and her students took on Red Hook, Brooklyn, an area still heavily affected by post–Hurricane Sandy reconstruction projects. Aniket Shahane (MArch ’05) led a studio based on neighboring Gowanus and its complicated relationship with gentrification, marked by the 2013 opening of a Whole Foods. Anthony Acciavatti, Diana Balmori Assistant Professor, and his students examined the Triboro RX Line and sites along it to “engage with the mechanisms of development and forms of city making to create new grounds in the outer boroughs.” David Eugin Moon’s students proposed projects for Coney Island that responded to the pandemic and the racial inequality highlighted in 2020. Finally, Tei Carpenter challenged his students to propose new possibilities for the Stony Creek Quarry, in Branford, Connecticut.

Re-Imagining Empire State Plaza Stella Betts and Brett Schneider Senior critic Stella Betts and critic Brett Schneider organized a studio focused on adaptive urban recycling at Empire State Plaza, in Albany, New York. The plaza was considered in relation to the city, with which it shares an often fraught relationship. Built in the 1960s and ’70s, Empire State Plaza was a Modernist government center, emerging among contemporaneous movements within urban planning that led to myriad problems problems including hostile defensive structures and homogenization of the urban fabric. The capitol complex generated a series of questions for students: How might the space adapt and transform to better engage urban and infrastructural changes? How might new programs or uses of the plaza invite the public to interact with the space differently? The class traveled to Albany and then to Brasí lia and São Paulo to research the effects, successes, and failures of Modernist urban planning in different contexts. Students were asked to consider climate change, sustainable building practices, and social inclusivity at the local, state, and national levels to inform their redesigns for the plaza. The studio challenged

Housing and the domestic environment, composed of seemingly isolated and private spaces, have always been determined by factors in the outside world, including cultural (most often gendered) influences, political agendas, and economic factors. Despite its functional necessity, housing has often been weaponized to enforce gender roles and segregation of class and race. Tatiana Bilbao, Charles Gwathmey Professor in Practice, Andrei Harwell (MArch ‘06), senior critic, and photographer Iwan Baan led a studio focused on dissecting the current disposition of the domestic sphere. Traveling to the Mayan region of the Yucatan Peninsula as well as Chiapas and Mexico City, students were given a comparative tour of different ways of living across architectural, social, and political systems.

The studio prompted students to challenge the house as the paradigm for dwelling by reconsidering our definitions of single-function spaces and methods for removing the house from market inventory under capitalism. Students were asked instead to imagine housing that serves people rather than a political or economic system.

The role of the architect was questioned, given the profession’s hand in “the standardization, distribution, and the making of spaces for specific functions, which shapes a discriminatory society.” Students worked individually to design specific structures for the site, a block in Colonia Juárez, Mexico City, which came together collectively in a new proposal for communal living.

Root and Innovation: Rediscovery of Majiayao Contemporary Zhu Pei and Karolina Czeczek The 1924 excavation of the Majiayao ruins in Gansu, China, was the catalyst for the redis-

covery of one of the most important prehistoric civilizations of the upper Yellow River. The findings included many examples of painted pottery, considered the peak of the art form at the time, for which the Majiayao culture was known. Zhu Pei, William B. and Charlotte Shepherd Davenport Visiting Professor, and Karolina Czeczek (MArch ‘15), critic, organized a studio in which students designed a museum and observatory for the Majiayao archaeologist site. In addition to the challenges of designing any museum, the ruins demand building in situ while minimizing disturbances to antiquities, which requires careful consideration of the site, its history, and the forms and materiality of the broader context, among other factors.

To prepare, students traveled to Arizona and Nevada to understand how site-specific buildings and land-art installations interact with various landscapes. Visits to New York City, the Beinecke Library, and the Yale Art Gallery allowed them to examine different methods for displaying artifacts. Working on the site in pairs, the students took on either the museum or the observatory. Asked to consider the “architectural noumenon,” they responded tectonically to the elements an architect can control — light, ventilation, materiality, and spaces — along with those a designer cannot — culture, history, and memory.

The Future of Entertainment Neil Thomas, Ray Winkler, and Beom Jun Kim In this studio students considered the role of the architect as storyteller. Neil Thomas, visiting professor, Ray Winkler, William Henry Bishop Visiting Professor, and critic Beom Jun Kim (MArch ‘09) challenged students to create new typologies of entertainment architecture — whether touring shows, theaters, or pavilions — in response to the pandemic. One effect of the pandemic on the entertainment industry is the division in entertainment history between physical and digital. Rather than considering them distinct roads to choose from, this studio posited that overlap of the two could lead to the possibilities of “colliding or cohabiting.” The studio started with the thesis that architecture and entertainment are closely related practices, with architecture used as a way “to augment and embellish the presence of Pharaohs,

Ana Batlle Cabral (MArch ’23) Tatiana Bilbao, Charles Gwathmey Professor in Practice, with Andrei Harwell (MArch ’06), senior critic, and Iwan Baan

Constructs

visual research reports that presented the results of the design interventions. At the final review the students presented largescale handcrafted building components, as well as intricate detail drawings.

Brick Oven Mauricio Pezo, Sofía von Ellrichshausen, and José Aragüez Amanda Tian (MArch ’24) Tick-Tock Ray Winkler, William Henry Bishop Visiting Professor, and Neil Thomas, visiting professor, with Beom Jun Kim (MArch ’09), critic

Popes, Popstars, and the People and convey their message to the masses.” Other introductory challenges were to avoid digital overstimulation while preserving a sense of communal spirit in enjoying entertainment.

The students traveled to New York to explore Times Square and Broadway, to TAIT, in Lititz, Pennsylvania, and finally to the Las Vegas Strip. Upon return to New Haven, they chose between sites in New York and Las Vegas and designed projects that proposed future forms of entertainment, whether analog, digital, or hybrid, for audiences of varying sizes.

The brick oven — as machine, hearth, and symbol — was the starting point of this studio led by Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professors Mauricio Pezo and Sofía von Ellrichshausen and critic José Aragüez. For them the brick oven represents “the architectural project as a conceptual tool to anticipate the future, to foresee the invisible, to build up the inexorable opacity that intensifies human existence.”

Life/Craft: Architectural Behaviorology at the Raymond Farm in New Hope Momoyo Kaijima and Andrew Benner Momoyo Kaijima, Norman R. Foster Visiting Professor, and senior critic Andrew Benner (MArch ’03) started off their studio with a chicken-and-egg question: “How does architecture shape our life and the other way around?”

The studio focused on the Raymond Farm, designed by Antonin and Noémi Raymond as a space for learning and making through the synthesis of Modernism with craft traditions, especially those of Japan.

The students were asked to consider architectural form as a social language, one with power over human behavior as well as the environment, keeping in mind the tenets of Atelier Bow-Wow’s “Architectural Behaviorology.” They also took on actornetwork drawing analyses and research into Antonin Raymond’s design methodology.

These iterative explorations led to designing interventions for the Raymond Farm (with a 1:1 study of material and craft) and compiling

Sosa Erhabor (MArch ’23) and Nabil Haque (MArch ’24) A Circle is an Island Mauricio Pezo and Sofía von Ellrichshausen, Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professors, with José Aragüez, critic

It also formed the material basis for the studio. Working in pairs, students designed a cultural center in the rural Ñuble Region of Chile. Unsettled until recently and characterized by a pastoral lifestyle, the region requires projects that are responsive to gravity and the landscape (situated at the ground level and interacting with surrounding nature) and that use traditional load-bearing masonry construction (brick in particular).

In keeping with Pezo and von Ellrichshausen’s Naïve Intention teaching method — “an intimate research on the apparent contradiction between intentionality and chance, rationality and futility, prediction and circumstance, authorship and anonymity” — the students undertook three states of production: inventory, drawing, and image. At the final review the students presented walls covered completely with iterative paintings and endless variations of their projects.

A Particular (New England) Building Carrie Norman, Thomas Kelley, and Violette de la Selle

Zishi Li (MArch ’23), Anjiang Xu (MArch ’23), and Tian Xu (MArch ’23) Living (With) Arts Momoyo Kaijima, Norman R. Foster Visiting Professor, with Andrew Benner (MArch ’03), senior critic

In Wethersfield, the self-proclaimed “most ancient town” in Connecticut, is the Joseph Webb House. Having served as George Washington’s headquarters in May of 1781, the house has been a National Historic Landmark since 1935.

Led by Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant

Samuel Golini (MArch ’23) Boston Pops Plaza Ann M. Beha, Robert A.M. Stern Visiting Professor, with George Knight (MArch ’95), senior critic

Professors Carrie Norman and Thomas Kelley, and critic Violette de la Selle (MArch ’14), “A Particular (New England) Building” asked students to “project future forms of optimism” onto the Joseph Webb House and turn it into a public athenaeum. The studio examined buildings from various periods and put Kenneth Frampton’s “Towards a Critical Regionalism” in conversation with New England, one of the first sites of Western colonization in North America.

The instructors delineated three parts to the project: the renovation of parts or the whole of the interior, the conversion of parts of the existing program, and an addition to the existing structure. The studio asked for “particularity” from students: that is, a thoughtfulness and sensitivity to the place, the history, the program, and the inhabitants.

To understand the history, culture, and geography of New England, the class visited historic towns in Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, learning from Indigenous and religious communities, historic battlefields, and industrial buildings.

Post-Plantation Landscapes Mabel O. Wilson and Jordan H. Carver What is the relationship between slavery and architecture? Early maps of South Carolina, Savannah, Georgia, and innumerous other sites of colonialism and slavery show how tools of architecture — Euclidean geometry and orthographic projection — were essential to enabling exploitative economic systems. From there the formation of the plantation and the manufactured assembly of humans, labor, plants, and animals to feed into a capitalist cycle spread throughout the world. The plantation form is embodied in the present in prisons, cities, and resorts, among other typologies.

Mabel O. Wilson, Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor, and Jordan H. Carver, KPF Visiting Scholar, organized this studio to examine the plantation and its contemporary manifestations, as well as what a post-plantation future might look like. The class visited the site of Seneca Village in Central Park, the Cross Bronx Expressway, the North River Wastewater Treatment Plant and Riverbank State Park, the African Burial Ground in Manhattan, and Columbia University’s campus in Manhattanville. First students undertook a project titled “plantation

lexicon,” where they analyzed the plantation collectively to map out its various components. From there they split off into smaller groups and, using the class lexicon, identified aspects of the plantation that showed up in the sites they had visited. Students then made models and drawings to understand how the enclosures of “plantation logic” are created, how they work, and how and where they’re subverted. By the final review the students had created proposals for protocols that would subvert and resist the plantation typology, resulting in “postplantation landscapes.”

Arts and the City— Legacy Meets Possibility Ann M. Beha and George Knight Ann M. Beha, Robert A.M. Stern Visiting Professor, and senior critic George Knight (MArch ’95) led a studio addressing the crises facing the musical performance industry. Students were asked to focus on Symphony Hall in Boston, designed by McKim Mead and White, considering both its storied legacy and current needs. The performance industry has changed dramatically since Symphony Hall’s construction in 1901; new media and technology, larger audiences, and the need for more community engagement and outreach all have implications for the institution’s long-term viability.

Students visited Boston to tour the building and listen to the Boston Symphony Orchestra and traveled to Chicago to examine examples of adaptive reuse, urban planning, and musical and performance architecture. In the studio they worked to combine renewal, reuse, and new designs in proposals responding to the changing role of the performing arts in relation to the city and its potential for contributing to the local community.

“Most proposed new structures extending the BSO, and others renovated and repurposed the existing addition,” Beha said. “Within the Hall itself, students revised circulation and support facilities — honoring architectural and acoustic quality and emotional attachment to the performance space. This reverence was, at first, surprising, but sophisticated. Their approach — renewing but companioning the Hall — illuminated both new and old.”

— Livy Li (MArch ’25)

Tiana Kimball (MArch ’23) A particular (New England) building Carrie Norman and Thomas Kelley, Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professors, with Violette de la Selle (MArch ’14), critic

Kyle Coxe (MArch ’23) and Maya Gamble (MArch ’23) Wastewater Parks: Envisioning an Equitable Future for Sewage Treatment in New York City Mabel O. Wilson, Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor, with Jordan H. Carver, KPF Visiting Scholar

Fall 2023

School News

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Faculty News Anthony Acciavatti’s work on the Ganges River basin was acquired recently by the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London, for its permanent collection. The acquisition — which includes new instruments for mapping soils, original drawings and models of architecture and agricultural production, documentary sketchbooks, and hundreds of photographs — will be exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in East London (V&A East) in 2025. Acciavatti, who is the Diana Balmori Assistant Professor, published “Concrete Poetry: Thomas Edison and the Almost-Built World,” in The Public Domain Review. A continuation of his research on patents in architecture and engineering, the essay looks at Edison’s attempts to create a single-pour concrete house for mass production in the early twentieth century.

Acciavatti also contributed chapters to The Great Padma: The Epic River that Made the Bengal Delta (2023), edited by Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, and Way Beyond Bigness: The Need for a Watershed Architecture (2023), by Derek Hoeferlin. This past year he delivered talks at the STS Circle at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, the Rhode Island School of Design, and Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies, in Mumbai.

Critic Daisy Ames (MArch ‘13) is a recipient of the 2023 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers. This year’s theme is “Uncomfortable.” Her firm, Studio Ames, responds to two of the built environment’s most pressing issues: the housing and climate crises. Intervening at the nexus of the two, the practice’s work examines housing policy, segregation, and repression as well as sustainable construction materials and techniques. The results illuminate often-invisible elements of the built environment and offer a challenge to traditional domestic paradigms.

Ann Beha, Spring 2023 Robert A.M.Stern Visiting Professor, and her firm, Annum Architects, won AIA CT Excellence Awards for the Yale Humanities Quadrangle and Greenwich Academy New Lower School & Middle School Expansion. Beha also received an honorary degree from Wheaton College at the 2023 commencement ceremony.

Dean Deborah Berke’s work was on display this summer as part of Exercises in Imagination, an exhibition of projects by the seventeen American artists and architects elected to the National Academy of Design

in fall 2022. Her firm, Deborah Berke Partners, has been renamed TenBerke. The firm redesigned Harvard University’s Lewis International Law Center, a library originally designed by Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson & Abbott and completed in 1957. TenBerke’s overhaul of the building features new additions such as additional meeting rooms and collaboration spaces. In the fall the firm completed two new residential colleges at Princeton University, which received a merit citation in the 2023 AIANY Design Awards.

Associate Dean Phil Bernstein (BA ’79, MArch ’83) contributed the article “Autonomous Algorithmic Architects: Wicked Problems of Machine Learning in Architecture” to Archinect. The article reflects on the opportunities, threats, and resulting strategies for the confluence of human and machine intelligence in the profession. The text was adapted from Bernstein’s book Machine Learning: Architecture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, published by RIBA in 2022.

Stella Betts, senior critic in architecture and partner at LEVENBETTS with David Leven (MArch ’91), recently completed the East Flatbush Library, in Brooklyn, New York, which reopened on June 6. The firm also received a NYC Public Design Commission Excellence in Design Award for its Baisley Park Community Library, in Queens, New York. The Red Hook Library, in Brooklyn — the first Net Zero Library for the Brooklyn Public Library — is currently under construction.

Tatiana Bilbao, Charles Gwathmey Professor in Practice, was named an honorary fellow by the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) in 2021 and received the Richard Neutra Award for Professional Excellence from the Department of Architecture at Cal Poly Pomona in 2022. Bilbao’s work was collected into the monographic exhibition En Común, shown at Aedes Architecture Forum, in Berlin, in 2022, with the support of CEMEX and AW Architektur & Wohnen magazine, which named Bilbao Architect of the Year 2022. The exhibition traveled later that year to COAM, in Madrid. Tatiana Bilbao Estudio was also the focus of the show Dibujar con la(s) historia(s), displayed at the Museum of Mexico City, and her studies of communal laundry facilities were featured in the installation La ropa sucia se lava en casa (Dirty clothes are washed at home), the inaugural MECCA x NGV Women in Design Commission, in Melbourne. The Álvaro

Tatiana Bilbao Estudio, Research Center of the Sea of Cortés, Mazatlán, 2023. Photograph by Iwan Baan.

Carrillo Cultural Center, designed by Bilbao in collaboration with Mauricio Rocha and Alberto Kalach, opened in Oaxaca in November 2022. In spring 2023 Bilbao presented the Michael Goldsmith Lecture at Cornell, spoke at the Guggenheim Museum’s The World Around Summit, participated in the Centre Pompidou’s Moviment program, and joined Jacques Herzog, Ila Bêka, and Louise Lemoine in conversation at the Pinault Collection. Most recently Bilbao’s Research Center of the Sea of Cortés opened in Mazatlán, offering visitors an immersive experience of Mexico’s marine and coastal ecosystems across three levels and multiple aquarium tanks.

Senior Critic Brennan Buck’s work and writing with David Freeland were included in a recent issue of AD titled “California Dreaming.” Over the summer FreelandBuck completed Tunnel Vision, a large artwork suspended in the new headquarters of the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority.

The structure is composed of three interlocking conical surfaces printed and cut with a projected photograph of the Metro system’s iconic concrete coffered stations, designed by Harry Weese. The firm also finished two houses on a steep hillside in the Mount Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles. Buck began serving on the board of the YSoA publication Perspecta earlier this year.

Craig Buckley, assistant professor in the Art History department, received a Graham Foundation grant to support The Street and the Screen: Architectures of Spectatorship in the Age of Cinema, a book that charts the development of a global screen landscape in the first half of the twentieth century.

Through the lens of five cities — Berlin, Paris, Casablanca, São Paulo, and New York — the book argues that media buildings open up divergent histories of Modernism while offering new understandings of architecture’s role in processes of cultural globalization.

The Vitra Design Museum, in cooperation with the Barragan Foundation, organized a lecture by visiting professor Luis E. Carranza as part of a series of forums examining Luis Barragán’s work from different perspectives with the intention of making it more accessible to a broader audience. The first lecture of the series, “On Time and Experience: Luis Barragán and Modern Living,” was given by Carranza, who presented Barragán in the context of Mexican Modernism.

Critic Tei Carpenter was featured, along with fellow faculty members Karolina Czeczek and Miriam Peterson, as well as YSoA alumni and former faculty, in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition Architecture Now: New York, New Publics.

The firm she cofounded, Agency — Agency, was selected for inclusion in CULTURED magazine’s Young Architects 2023 list.

LEVENBETTS, East Flatbush Library, 2023.

Karolina Czeczek (MArch ’15), critic and principal of Only If Architecture, had the project People’s Pool featured in the MoMA exhibition New York, New Publics. The show was the inaugural edition of “Architecture Now,” a periodic exhibition series that will highlight emerging talent and foreground groundbreaking projects in contemporary

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Constructs

architecture. Her project, a speculative design intervention for the existing Kosciuszko Pool, stems from Czeczek’s research on public swimming pools in New York City. Her practice, Only If, was featured in the book Building Practice, edited by Kyle Miller and Molly Hunker, along with interviews of architects, designers, educators, curators, fabricators, strategists, critics, and activists who are advancing speculative design through the culture and politics of building. Only If’s recently completed Narrow House project was published in The Plan, Interior Design, BauNetz, and FRAME as one of four residential spaces “leading the push to increase urban housing stock.”

Czeczek gave a talk on New York City public pools for the EPFL Lausanne Design Studio “Water in the City,” led by Point Supreme.

Peggy Deamer taught the Alt Development seminar at YSoA with Nick McDermott, looking at alternative architect-empowered ways to produce affordable housing. She delivered an online lecture for the Parisian course “Espaces (de)genrés” at ENSA Paris-Malaquais on March 8, the day students went on strike against changes to French retirement laws. In March Deamer participated on the panel “Labor + Extraction,” at Carnegie Mellon, and delivered a keynote for the virtual “Disrupt” symposium. In April she lectured in person at Monash University in Melbourne on “Anticompetition,” and was interviewed for Adrian Ramsay’s Talk Design podcast. Her article “Forming Action: The Subject in the Object” was published in the special issue “Cranbrook Architecture: A Legacy of Latitude,” AD 93; and her piece “Professionalization and Architecture” appeared in “Professionalism,” Graz Architecture Magazine 19.

Senior Critic Kyle Dugdale (PhD ’15) was invited in February to give the talk “Spatial Practice” at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons; in April he spoke at the Morningside Institute on the challenges presented by the classical architecture of Washington, D.C.; in May he made a presentation at the symposium “Shape of the Sacred,” organized by Joseph Clarke (PhD ’14) with the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America and Fordham University; and in June he was awarded the Outstanding Presentation Award for the paper “False Communion: Misappropriation of the Sacred,” given at the 13th annual international symposium of the Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality Forum (ACSF).

Dugdale’s monograph Architecture After God was published by Birkhäuser in early 2023.

Ana María Durán Calisto, Daniel Rose (1951) Visiting Assistant Professor, wrote about recent rediscoveries of complex ancient Amazonian cities revealed by LiDAR for Domus magazine. These urban constellations featured trade networks, raised fields, reservoirs, causeways, mounds, and other agroecological infrastructures.

Keller Easterling, Enid Storm Dwyer Professor, and visiting professor Vyjayanthi Rao have been invited to participate in the Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB), from September 21, 2023, through January 2, 2024. CAB 5, titled This Is a Rehearsal and

curated by the interdisciplinary arts collective Floating Museum, “takes an expansive view of design as an iterative rehearsal process to explore architecture, cities, and the different social, ecological, economic, and political forces that shape them.”

Easterling “outlined forms of sovereignty as solidarities that are not reduced to specific places but are rather atomized and mobile” in a new essay for INSITE “Journal_05: Speech Acts.” She also delivered the lecture “Trust Land” for the new e-flux Architecture Lectures series.

Mark Foster Gage (MArch ’01), associate professor, wrote the foreword to the new book Architecture, Film, and the In-between, edited by Vahid Vahdat and James F. Kerestes, which features original contributions by Beatriz Colomina, Juhani Pallasmaa, Giuliana Bruno, and Eva Perez De Vega, among others. He also delivered the keynote for the 2023 Architectural Informatics Symposium at the University of Tokyo.

Steven Harris Architects, the firm of professor in practice Steven Harris, was named to the AD100 again this year. The firm was featured in Architectural Digest this past December for its Bridgehampton Beach House, completed in April 2022. The project also won a jury award from AIA Peconic for distinguished design and will be featured on the cover of Galerie. The Bedford Quarry House won a merit award from AIA New York as well as Interior Design’s “Best of Year — Country House” and was featured in a “Unique Spaces” segment on Architectural Digest’s video channels. The firm’s Winter Park House won a citation from AIA New York State and was featured in Wallpaper, Est Living, and Elle Décor Turkey. The firm’s first apartment building, at 109 East 79th Street, in New York, was completed this June. Other recently completed projects include an elevated waterfront home in Charleston, South Carolina; and apartments on the Upper East Side, on Central Park West, and in Florida.

Lecturer Yoko Kawai presented the paper “Missing Links in Designing Space for Mindfulness in Secular and Collective Settings” at the 2023 Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality Forum (ACSF) Symposium, in May. Critics Talitha Liu (MArch ’13) and Lexi Tsien (MArch ’13) were profiled with their practice, Soft-Firm, in Metropolis magazine, featuring the firm’s work on reframing social paradigms through design.

Ariane Lourie Harrison, lecturer, had work from her seminar “Feral Surfaces and Multi-Species Architecture” featured in Model: Barcelona Architectures Festival in April. The projects examined how building facades can provide new alternative spaces for habitats. Her firm, Harrison Atelier (HAt), also won the Installation Model Award at the festival.

Willow Technologies, a sustainable materials and building technology company founded

by Assistant Professor Mae-ling Lokko, was selected as one of ArchDaily’s Best

Future Expansion, addition to the Park Stope United Methodist Church, 2020.

Fall 2023

New Practices of 2023. Lokko has ongoing exhibitions of her work installed at the Serralves Foundation, in Porto and Lisbon, and at the Museum of the Future, in Dubai.

She was featured in the “Ecologies” issue of Contemporary And, Crafts Magazine, Stylepark, and Tufts Now’s series “Earth Advocates.” Lokko was selected as part of Kehinde Wiley’s 2023 cohort at Black Rock, in Dakar, Senegal. She was recently published in Energies and e-flux Architecture and, under a UNEP grant at Yale’s Center for Ecosystems in Architecture (CEA), contributed to the 2022 Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction and a forthcoming UNEP Buildings and Climate Report. Lokko spoke at a number of forums, including COP27, the RICS World Built Environment Forum, the Architectural League’s “Field to Form” Series, the Yale for Humanity: Cities and Climate Solutions Panel, the 2023 Design for Freedom Summit at Grace Farms, and the UConn Plant Science and Landscape Architecture Series. Lokko is also serving on the jury of the 2023 DNA Paris Design Awards and the Sustainable Institution Prize, organized by E-Werk Luckenwalde, Atelier Luma Arles, and the Rupert Residency.

Critic Nicholas McDermott (MArch ’08) participated in the symposium “Edible Futures,” at Ohio State University’s Knowlton School of Architecture in January. His office, Future Expansion (FE), won the 2023 Ortner Award for a building addition to the Park Slope United Methodist Church, in Brooklyn. The award recognizes “projects and endeavors that make a positive contribution to maintaining or enhancing Park Slope’s unique identity.”

FE was also named to the Architectural Record 2023 Design Vanguard.

N H D M Architects, founded by Nahyun Hwang and critic David Eugin Moon, received a Graham Foundation grant for Migrating Futures, an exhibit for the Korean Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, which “investigates the historic and contemporary geographies of diaspora communities and transnational migrant workers in Korea and across Asia.” Earlier this year the firm was named one of the Architectural League’s 2023 emerging voices.

Joeb Moore (MED ’91), critic in architecture and principal of Joeb Moore & Partners, had his firm’s project Hill House featured on the cover of Architectural Record as one of the 2023 “Record Houses.” The same project was a winner of the 2023 Residential Design Magazine Architecture Awards. The firm is currently working on projects in Miami, Palm Beach, Colorado, and Fairfield and Westchester Counties.

André Patrão, a postdoctoral fellow at YSoA funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, has recently published the paper “What Architects Do with Philosophy: Three Case Studies of the Late-Twentieth Century,” in the AJAR – ARENA Journal of Architectural Research (accessible online). The article compares significant instances in which philosophers’ thinking influenced the work of architects: Martin Heidegger’s role in several of Kenneth Frampton’s texts, Michel Foucault’s discreet yet ineluctable presence in a Rem Koolhaas design, and Jacques Derrida’s collaboration with Peter Eisenman. With their distinct approaches, aims, and outputs, each case study offers insights into the promising potentials, as well as the chronic problems, of the relationship between architecture and philosophy.

Patrão was a guest speaker at a PhD symposium organized by the Doctoral Program of Architecture and Sciences of the City, at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in Switzerland.

His talk “Method in the Making: Process, Product, and the Personal during a PhD” considered the personal dimension of research methodology and its place as an inherent and indispensable process, rather than a presupposition, of doctoral research. At the 21st Annual Meeting of the Foucault Circle, Patrão discussed the part that architecture played in the philosopher’s work, in “Architecture for

Work from the “Feral Surfaces and the Multi-Species City” seminar taught by Ariane Lourie Harrison.

Image provided by the Barcelona City Council.

Foucault: Rereading Influential yet Incidental Words and Silences.” A very different overlap between architecture and philosophy was the topic of “The Wittgenstein House: Or When a Philosopher Becomes an Architect,” presented at the 6th Yale Postdoctoral Association Symposium. This semester marked the conclusion of the Philosophy and the Built Environment Working Group, sponsored by the Whitney Humanities Center. In his capacity as organizer, Patrão would like to publicly thank everyone who took part in the working group so actively and enthusiastically, particularly Ishaan Jajodia, Leland Stange, Kyle Dugdale, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, and Paul Grimstad, who led stimulating discussions throughout the year.

Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen (MED ’94), assistant dean and professor, published the book Untimely Moderns: How 20th Century Architecture Reimagined the Past (Yale University Press) in early May and lectured on the topic at Helsinki University shortly afterward. A symposium on the subject is being planned for spring 2024.

Critic Violette de la Selle (MArch ’14) was featured in Detail magazine, with Bruce Becker (MArch ’85), in an interview on the Hotel Marcel preservation project, in New Haven.

Aniket Shahane (MArch ‘05), senior critic in architecture, has several works under construction in New York City with his Brooklyn-based practice OA. The recently completed South Slope House has been highlighted in a variety of print and online publications, such as Divisare and Dwell.

Shahane recently served on several different juries across the country, including final reviews at the University of Texas at Austin, Carnegie Mellon, in Pittsburgh, and the Municipal Art Society’s 2023 MASterworks Awards, in New York.

Mabel O. Wilson, Spring 2023 Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor, was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and will work on completing the manuscript “Building Race and Nation: Slavery, Dispossession, and U.S. Civic Architecture,” an exploration of how modern discourses of architecture, nationalism, and race influenced the creation of civic buildings in the early years of the United States.

Zhu Pei, Spring 2023 William B. and Charlotte Shepherd Davenport Visiting Professor, completed the Zijing International Conference Camp in Jiangxi, China, which is divided into several buildings, dissolved into surrounding hills, and modeled on traditional settlement patterns. He published Jingdezhen Imperial Kiln Museum (Images Publishing, 2023), a monograph on his project of the same name, featuring commentary from Fan Di’an, Kenneth Frampton, Steven Holl, Arata Isozaki, Rem Koolhaas, Thomas Krens, Mohsen Mostafavi, and Wang Mingxian, among others. He received the CED Distinguished Alumni Award from UC Berkeley and had work exhibited at GA International in Tokyo (July– September 2023), the Venice Architecture Biennale (through November 26, 2023), and the Interconnexion-Exposition d’architecture contemporaine franco-chinoise (May– August 2023), in Tianjin, China.

2023 Pritzker Architecture Prize ceremony in Athens The Yale School of Architecture was well represented at the 2023 Pritzker Architecture Prize ceremony, held this May in Athens, Greece, during a two-day series of magnificent events. On May 23 Sir David Chipperfield, the 2011 Norman R. Foster Visiting Professor and 52nd Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, presented his acceptance speech, “The Role of Practice,” in the Kaftantzoglou Ceremonial Hall at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) School of Architecture, which was livestreamed through social media and is available online. First Alejandro Aravena, jury chair and the 2016 laureate, announced the award decision, introducing Chipperfield and presenting an overview of his work. A panel discussion moderated by Pritzker Prize executive director Manuela Lucá-Dazio with participants Chipperfield, Diébédo Francis Kéré (2022 laureate and 2022 Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professor), and Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal (2021 laureates) followed the lecture. The open-air invitation-only black-tie gala the following evening—attended by international and local luminaries and politicians including Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis—took place in the archaeological site of the Ancient Agora, mainly at the Stoa of Attalus, a Hellenistic linear portico fully reconstructed in the

School News

1950s by the American School of Classical Studies. Pritzker jury members present both days included Dean Deborah Berke, Kazuyo Sejima, Wang Shu, Barry Bergdoll, and former associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Stephen Breyer.

Soon after the 2023 Pritzker Prize ceremony venue was selected, Chipperfield was announced as winner of the closed international competition for a much-anticipated local project: the reconstruction and extension of the National Archaeological Museum, coincidentally located adjacent to the NTUA. Competition entrants had included jury member Sejima and several Pritzker Prize winners, including Rem Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron, and Jean Nouvel.

The state-organized competition—cofunded by major private donors—had already sparked controversy for its exclusion of Greek architects other than in roles as local executive architects. The Pritzker celebration took place as tension over the controversial competition was redirected to the national political arena and, given its professional recognition of Chipperfield, contributed to ameliorating sentiments within the regional architectural community.

— Aristotelis Dimitrakopoulos (MArch ’00)

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Alumni News Review of Norman Foster at the Centre Pompidou

The Norman Foster exhibition, on view at the Centre Pompidou from May 10 to August 7, 2023, was the largest ever dedicated to one of the most prolific architects of our time. Curated by Frédéric Migayrou, designed by Sir Norman Foster (MArch ’62), and organized in collaboration with Foster + Partners and the Norman Foster Foundation, the exhibition covered nearly 2,200 square meters of the top-floor galleries, overlooking the skyline of Paris.

Some 500 drawings, 300 notebooks, and 130 models were displayed along with artwork by Umberto Boccioni, Constantin Brancusi, Fernand Leger, and Ai Weiwei, as well as various design objects including planes and cars, that inspired Foster throughout his career, many of them from his private collection. The exhibition also featured a wall of names of people who contributed to the projects on display, 10,000 in all, including many YSoA graduates who worked in his office over the years. Yet mostly the exhibition conveyed the vision of a singular globetrotting architect who resides in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Spain, and the United States and counts some of the world’s largest corporations, most powerful individuals, and wealthiest nations as his clients.

Foster founded the Team 4 office in 1963, exactly 60 years ago, with his first wife, Wendy Cheesman, and Richard Rogers (MArch ’62), and subsequently Foster and Associates in 1967, which became Foster + Partners ten years later. Yet in his

introductory text Foster makes it clear that the founding principal is by no means ready to call it quits, underlining that the exhibition, despite covering projects from the very beginning of his practice, should be read as a “futurospective” rather than a retrospective.

By emphasizing his lifelong interest in sustainability, Foster gives the exhibition a certain Nietzschean twist, justifying retrospective reflection because it’s been done presumably for the benefit of today’s environmental crisis. The show’s overall tone was utopian and hopeful: It posited that architecture can help solve current environmental problems with the aid of new technologies and that architects should learn from the past while moving steadfastly toward the future. Buckminster Fuller, with whom Foster collaborated in the 1970s, served as a guiding star, and the unbuilt lunar habitations Foster + Partners designed recently for the European Space Agency bear an unescapable resemblance to the old Bucky domes. The idea that one could move to the Moon to experience the good old hippie vibe brings together space and time travel and prompts the question: How can historical reflection help us move forward?

Similarly the installation aimed to make past and current works jell into one seamless oeuvre. The first room, displaying sketches, architectural drawings, and travel photos, traced the evolution of Foster’s practice year by year in chronological order.

In the second, and largest, part of exhibition — housing large-scale models that were custom built for the exhibition — the visitor was invited to leave the past behind. Gone is the archival aura and chronological ordering of the drawing gallery. Gleaming of newness, the models were organized around seven themes: Nature and Urbanity, Vertical City, Skin and Bones, History and Tradition, Planning and Place, and Networks and Mobility. A final, separate room dedicated to Futures included proposals for extraterrestrial habitation and space travel.

While the archival drawings were housed in a black box to protect them from daylight, the room displaying models opened up to the Parisian skyline in a spectacular manner. Along the window were placed a row of skyscrapers, including the iconic Hongkong Shanghai Bank Corporation headquarters (1989): the Hearst Tower (2006), in Manhattan, which dwarfs the Art Deco building below; and the cone-shaped Swiss Re headquarters (2004), in London.

Their placement against the city that Walter Benjamin dubbed the “Capital of the Nineteenth Century” made it clear that new

1960s Alexander Tzonis (MArch ’63) curated the photographic exhibition Shacks: Catastrophe and Creation (Παράγκες: Καταστροφή και δημιουργία) at the Canadian Institute in Greece (June 22–July 12, 2023). The show chronicles the dwellings built along the Ilissos River in Athens by refugees from Asia Minor. Tzonis documented these makeshift structures in photos and watercolors when he was a teen.

1970s The Louis Armstrong House Museum, designed by Caples Jefferson Architects, a firm led by Sara Caples (MArch ’74) and Everardo Jefferson (MArch ’73), opened on July 6. Located in Corona, Queens, it includes a home for the jazz musician’s archive, a 75-seat performance space, and exhibits, all within a two-story building that matches the scale of the surrounding neighborhood. cities are being built increasingly in Asia and the Middle East — and if Foster and his fellow techno-utopists prevail, soon on other planets. Virgin Galactic’s Spaceport America, completed in 2014, is ready to receive those who believe the future lies beyond the planet Earth. Masdar City (2013), in Abu Dhabi, and Apple Park (2017), housing 12,000 employees on a 75-hectare campus in Cupertino, California, could as well have been built on the Moon.

Considering the scale of many of the recent projects, like the two-mile-long terminal at Beijing Capital International Airport (2008), I was at first surprised to find one of the firm’s smallest projects, the Ombrière au Vieux-Port, in Marseille (2013), chosen for the large banner hung on the Centre Pompidou main facade to welcome visitors to the show. Part of a master plan to reconfigure Marseille’s old port, it consists of a 151-by-72-foot canopy made of reflective stainless steel to protect pedestrians from rain and sun while mirroring them upside down. Yet in retrospect I have come to the conclusion that the project summarizes Foster’s ambition and talent in a spectacular manner.

One must indeed applaud his ability to calibrate architecture to house and channel large populations of people without compromising human scale and technical perfection. Furthermore, the trompe l’œil factor of the project reveals that as far as the old maestro is concerned architecture’s main function is not simply to reflect existing realities but to amplify them into new dimensions.

— Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen (MED ’94), assistant dean and professor

Andrés M. Duany (MArch ’74) and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (MArch ’74) were awarded honorary doctorate degrees at Yale’s 322nd commencement ceremony, on May 22, in recognition of their decades of leadership in architecture and city planning. Duany and Plater-Zyberk are best known for leading the Congress for the New Urbanism, an influential city-planning movement focused on placemaking and alternatives to suburban sprawl. Based in Miami, Duany and PlaterZyberk cofounded the firms Arquitectonica and, later, DPZ CoDesign. Plater-Zyberk was dean of the University of Miami School of Architecture from 1995 to 2013.

Jala Makhzoumi (MED ’75) delivered a keynote lecture at the 2023 New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architects Firth Conference, in Whakatū Nelson.

Louise Braverman (MArch ’77) delivered the lecture “Architecture of Art + Conscience” on March 9, 2023, at the National Arts Club in New York, on configuring our material world to create ethical built environments.

1980s Michael Kostow (MArch ’81) was recently featured in Interior Design magazine with a career-spanning interview touching on his 35 years as a professional architect. He discusses projects that set the standard for preservation as well as workplace and Broadway theater upgrades. He also discusses how being a jazz musician might make him a better architect. A recent project was the $47 million restoration and expansion of the Cort Theatre on Broadway, which was officially renamed the James Earl Jones Theatre in honor of the iconic award-winning actor.

The Shubert Organization, a client over many years and projects, engaged Kostow Greenwood Architects to design and build a new contemporary annex to expand accessibility, increase public space, add dressing rooms and rehearsal spaces, and enhance the beauty of the 110-year-old theater. Recent award recognition for the Annex includes being named a finalist in the NYCxDESIGN Awards and a Special Mention honoree in the Architizer A+Awards.

Brent Sherwood (BA ’80, MArch ’83) leads the development of space architecture for Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s space company.

As senior vice president of Space Systems Development for the past four years, he grew a 50-person, $30 million operation into an 1,100-person, $1 billion enterprise that created new business units for Lunar Transportation (which won a $3.4 billion contract from NASA) and for Space Mobility. The team is developing Orbital Reef, a commercially owned and operated space station for research and tourism.

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Constructs

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31 Vkhutemas: Art School of the Perpetual Revolution Review of Vkhutemas: Laboratory of Modernism 1920–1930 at the Cooper Union, April 25–May 5, 2023

HGA Architects and Engineers, Westwood Hills Nature Center, St. Louis Park, Minnesota, 2020.

Weiss/Manfredi, cofounded by Marion Weiss (MArch ’84), received two Merit Awards in the 70th Annual Progressive Architecture Awards, for the Longwood Gardens West Conservatory and the La Brea Tar Pits project.

Peter MacKeith (MArch ’85), dean of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas, has been selected to chair the advisory panel for a new memorial on the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., to honor those “who have served and sacrificed in the ongoing war on terrorism.”

Richard W. Hayes (MArch ’86) received a fellowship from the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH). He published a new essay on E. W. Godwin in Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens and spoke on the subject at New College Oxford, the British Institute for Interior Design, and the Universities of Paris, Tours, and Toulouse. Hayes was a featured speaker at a roundtable for recipients of the Brunner Grant at the AIA New York Chapter.

He also gave the keynote talk at Kean University’s annual conference “Thinking Creatively” and the Peter Blundell Jones Memorial lecture at the University of Sheffield.

Newick Architects, founded by Craig Newick (MArch ’87), received a 2022 AIA Connecticut Design Award in the Commercial, Industrial, Educational, and Multi-Family Residential Design category for the ‘r kids Family Center, in New Haven.

Craig Copeland (MArch ’89) has been elevated to the AIA College of Fellows in the Object Two category.

A renovation to the Bruce Museum, in Greenwich, Connecticut, was recently completed by EskewDumezRipple, where Steve Dumez (MArch ’89) is principal and design lead. The project includes a 42,000-square-foot wing providing expanded collection storage, permanent and changing exhibition spaces, and a new public entrance lobby and lecture hall.

Thomas Frechette (MArch ’89) has been promoted to senior associate at Pickard Chilton. He is currently coleader on the design of the CoStar Group’s new campus in Richmond, Virginia.

1990s Patricia Brett (MArch ’90) recently curated the exhibition Sculptural Imprints for the KINK Contemporary gallery, in Cleveland, featuring the work of seven printmakers exploring texture and space. Brett also taught workshops at the Art Students League of New York, Zygote Press, and the Morgan Paper Conservatory. Her work was

Fall 2023

recently acquired by MetroHealth Hospitals, in Cleveland, for its permanent collection.

Marc L’Italien (MArch ’90), design principal in the San Francisco office of HGA Architects and Engineers, has won a 2023 AIA Committee on the Environment (COTE) Award for the Westwood Hills Nature Center, in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. The project also earned a Zero Energy Certification from the International Living Future Institute in 2022.

The building’s flexibility and ability to handle visitor flow allowed it to open safely in 2020, when most museums were still closed.

Juan Miró (MArch ’91), a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, delivered lectures at the 2023 AIA Conference on Architecture, the Dallas Architecture Forum, AIA San Antonio, and in Mexico City this spring. He published an article in Architect’s Newspaper advocating against windowless dorm rooms, prompted by increased use of this room type at UT Austin. His firm, Miró Rivera Architects, received a Texas Medal of Arts Award, a 2023 Design Award from the Texas Society of Architects, and an AIA Austin Design Award.

Mo Zell (MArch ’98) has been named president of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) for 2023– 24. Zell was also appointed interim dean of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s new College of the Arts and Architecture in April.

She has served as interim dean of the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, which is now part of the College, since 2022.

Edgar Papazian (MArch ’99) has accepted an appointment as vice president of AIA Peconic for 2023.

Khoury Vogt Architects, cofounded by Erik Vogt (MED ’99), is a recipient of the ICAA’s 2023 Arthur Ross Award for Excellence in the Classical Tradition.

2000s Grace Ong Yan (MArch ’00), together with Andrew Hart and Elena Nestico, all faculty members at the Thomas Jefferson University College of Architecture and the Built Environment, won a $75,000 grant to create a public art piece celebrating Black history in Huntington, New York. The piece, “Redemption,” will be composed of three steel panels laser cut with quotes from prominent Black figures from the town, including Jupiter Hammon, John Coltrane, and Booker T. Washington.

Ron Stelmarski (MArch ’00) was elevated to the AIA College of Fellows in 2022 in the Object One category, focused on design. His work has been recognized for

The exhibition Vkhutemas: Laboratory of Modernism 1920–1930, co-curated by Anna Bokov (PhD ’17) and Steven Hillyer at the Cooper Union, retrieved the history of an astounding institution, Vkhutemas (acronym for Higher Art and Technical Workshops), from its “near eradication from the history of modernism,” according to Hillyer’s curatorial statement. Founded in Moscow in 1920, this design school for the masses was an early product of the Bolshevik Revolution, established as soon as Lenin and Trotsky took power and undertook educational reform. The timing alone speaks of strong ties, and mutual support, between the visual arts and political spheres — a moment when propaganda was a recognized constituent of cultural discourse. From the present standpoint, considering the divide separating politics from the academy and the arts, it is remarkable to look back at this synthesis of political and intellectual effort.

The mandate was both ambitious and indicative of the social transformations afoot. At a time when levels of education varied prodigiously, the school would be open to all, and up to 2,000 students enrolled at a time. Coming into being at a moment of profound artistic iconoclasm, the school was formed as the stratification of society and the canons of figural representation were deemed equally defunct. In the immediate wake of total and violent social upheaval, the curriculum established at Vkhutemas would reject conventional methods of art production as well as its means: the fixed studentinstructor hierarchy was jettisoned, gender equality was fostered, and education was free. The institute drew together pioneers of new modes of artistic creation such as Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, El Lissitzky, Vladimir Tatlin, and Kazimir Malevich, many of whom had previously been experimenting and teaching at the Vitebsk Art School, headed by Marc Chagall, and later

by Malevich.

The exhibition channeled pragmatic and profound questions addressing the pedagogy of the school. How do you create a common set of tools among students with entirely different degrees of prior education? How do you pursue new objectives and instill new techniques while banishing traditional emotive, compositional, and representational tropes? A new language was elaborated across creative disciplines, melding the technical, scientific, and inquisitive registers. As the school opened its doors, students were inducted into the freshly developed “foundational disciplines” that had been shaped by a subcommittee of the Institute of Artistic Culture (Inkhuk).

The work on display — photographs, records, and recreations of Vkhutemas student projects by students of the Cooper Union — exhibited immense creativity, invention, and disciplinary overlap. Though the show was organized to present the work though different pedagogical ends in different areas (exercises, combinatorics, constructions, instruments, projects), the artifacts suggested fluid exchange across studios.

Indeed the collective reset brought on by the Russian Revolution of 1917 manifested in the pedagogical program of the school and ultimately in its creative output: the Foundational Courses were required of all of the students, and the school sought to recognize all of its members on equal footing.

The school’s porous environment comes through in the exhibition. In Rodchenko’s “Composition on a Plane” graphics studio, the fundamental formulas of type setting and print layout were cast aside and the page was reintroduced as a two-dimensional expanse, or a spatial proposition.

This work clearly anticipated and dialogued with the Constructivist compositions of his colleagues in the architectural studios, conveying the fruitful intermingling across disciplines promoted at the school. Grappling with what Bokov calls the “the role of collectivity in learning,” this environment offered a stark contrast to Western European academic models that marked divisions between the technical and the plastic arts.

While the exhibition portrays an artistic idyll of creativity and equality, colder aspects of Taylorist production were also instrumentalized at the school.

In the “combinatorics” section of the exhibition, the wall text offered a less egalitarian view of the student body in which an instructor tracks success though quantitative output. Perhaps employed for their “objective” criteria, such systems reveal rigid means of evaluation, foretelling other tallying regimes that would define the USSR. Yet this undercurrent stands in vivid contrast to the many photos of students and instructors in their studios, brimming with excitement.

When Lenin died in 1924, the trajectory of the new Communist state was irrevocably shifted. While the mourning nation grappled with elaborate political maneuvering, Vkhutemas had lost its most powerful ally. By 1927 Trotsky was forced into exile, and Stalin, who remained in power, preferred a monumental Beaux Arts architecture. Before the school’s closing in 1930, the institution continued to form designers while sustaining bruising interventions from the Stalinist state. In its ten-year run, the school had construed its avant-garde thinking into a functioning institution. Before it fell into anonymity — atomized and unappreciated in Stalin’s USSR, and unspoken of in the West — the school’s achievements were recognized triumphantly in Paris, at the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, where it was awarded the Grand Prix.

— Violette de la Selle (MArch ’14) is a critic at the Yale School of Architecture and a founding member of Citygroup.

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ing Teaching from the Ohio State University Knowlton School of Architecture, part of the College of Engineering.

Maia Adele Simon (MED ’19) presented the talk “Breaks and Continuities: Spatializing Transition in Astana,” at Citygroup in New York on February 4, coinciding with the exhibition Aesthetics from the End of History: Liberalization, Privatization, and Other Ghosts of the ’90s. Simon is currently a PhD student in the history, theory, and criticism of architecture at MIT.

2020s Andrew Economos Miller (MArch ’20), Schidlowski Emerging Faculty Fellow at the College of Architecture and Environmental Design at Kent State University, curated the exhibition Refuse // Repose, shown at the school’s Armstrong Gallery.

Perkins & Will, El Paso Eastside Recreation Center, 2021.

inventive responses to culture and context, elevating the public realm, and galvanizing communities with architecture of enduring aesthetic, environmental, and social value.

Throughout 26 years of practice, the last 10 as design director of the Perkins & Will studio in Dallas, Stelmarski has worked with the goal of building new projects that honor the past, such as the award-winning Pittman Hotel, an adaptive-reuse project in Dallas.

His work on the 277-acre Fair Park Master Plan, in Dallas, inspired his vision for the city that was included in Watershed Urbanism, at the European Cultural Centre’s exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021.

His Singing Hills Recreation was recently called “The Best New Building in Dallas”

by Mark Lamster, architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News. Other recent projects include the Eastside El Paso Recreation Center and the Baylor Scott & White Health Administration Center.

MAD Architects, the office of Ma Yansong (MArch ’02), recently completed Timeless Beacon, an installation in Guangdong. The China Philharmonic Concert Hall, in Beijing, is nearing completion, and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, in Los Angeles, is expected to be completed in 2025.

The firm has unveiled renderings of its first project in South America, Qondesa, which will be the tallest building in Quito, Ecuador, and won an international competition for the design of Changchun Longjia International Airport Terminal 3, in China.

Dream the Combine, founded by Jennifer Newsom (BA ’01, MArch ’05) and Tom Carruthers (MArch ’05), received a 2023 Emerging Voices award from the Architectural League of New York. The practice also received a 2023 Rome Prize Fellowship.

Max Worrell (MArch ’06) and Jejon Yeung (MArch ’07) were profiled in T Magazine for their Springs Artist Studio on Long Island. Their firm, Worrell Yeung, received the Interior Design NYCxDesign Award in the category Social Impact, for Canal Projects, an art space in a landmarked cast-iron building on the corner of Canal and Wooster Streets, in SoHo, Manhattan.

Molly Wright Steenson (MED ’07) has been named president and CEO of the American Swedish Institute, in Minneapolis.

2010s Andreea Ion Cojocaru (MArch ’10) was recently featured on the panel “Placemaking Across Realities,” hosted by Spectra Cities at Cornell Tech.

Members of the class of 2013 were thrilled to return to campus at the end of April for their ten-year reunion. The weekend featured a series of events planned by Altair Peterson (MArch ’13) and lecturer Antonia Devine (MArch ’13) that included sponsoring a Friday 6 on 7 for current students; a conversation with Dean Berke on the school’s evolution and priorities; a fierce badminton tournament; and dinners and drinks at old favorites including Rudy’s and Bar pizza. More than half of the class came, from as far as Berlin, London, and the West Coast, as well as

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Brooklyn. Everyone may or may not have ended up at the Pink House for a Paprika! party on Friday night. The class of 2013 is already looking forward to its 20th reunion.

London-based firm Neiheiser Argyros, cofounded by Xristina Argyros (MArch ’13), completed the renovation of a Victorian terrace house, including the addition of a basement-level stepped courtyard.

Rob Bundy (MArch ’13) relaunched Bundy Architecture, in Raleigh, North Carolina, in November 2022.

Owen Howlett (MArch ’13) has been promoted to associate principal at Pickard Chilton. He is currently leading the design teams for several large-scale, mixed-use master plans, including significant developments such as Le Coeur, a complex repositioning of existing and new buildings on one of the most prominent sites in Düsseldorf, Germany, and CoStar Group’s new corporate campus in Richmond, Virginia.

Melissa Shin (MArch ’13), founder of Shin Shin Architecture, shared her experiences in the profession with AIA Los Angeles in honor of AAPI Heritage Month. Shin Shin Architecture received the 2022 AIA|LA Presidential Honor Emerging Practice Award and a 2022 AIA|LA Residential Architecture Award.

Brittany Utting (MArch ’14) and Daniel Jacobs (MArch ’14), of HOME-OFFICE, presented the lecture “Time Machines for a Future Climate” at the Cooper Union on March 23.

Elisa Iturbe (BA ’08, MEM ’15, MArch ’15) and Stanley Cho (MArch ’15), in collaboration with Alican Taylan, curated the exhibition Confronting Carbon Form, shown at the Cooper Union from March 21 to April 16, 2023. It featured original design work by the curators exploring the spatial roots of the climate crisis. Iturbe and Cho contributed the essay “Transgressing Immutable Lines,” on the potentials of community land trusts for addressing social and political challenges, to In Common, a collaboration between e-flux Architecture, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, UIC College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts, and Arc en Rêve Centre d’Architecture, in Bordeaux, France.

Madelynn Ringo (MArch ’16), founder of retail and experience design firm Ringo Studio, was featured in a profile in AN Interior focusing on her career trajectory and work for cookware company Our Place.

Skender Luarasi (PhD ’18) and Gary Huafan He (PhD ’20) edited the book Contemporary Perspectives on Architectural Organicism: The Limits of Self-Generation (Routledge, 2023), offering a variety of critiques of the Modernist idea of endless growth in the fields of architecture, literature, philosophy, and the history of science.

Tara Marchelewicz (MArch ’18) served on the jury for the 2023 Mississauga Urban Design Awards.

Zelig Fok (MArch ’19), assistant professor of architecture at Ohio State, received the Charles E. MacQuigg Award for Outstand-

Laura Pappalardo (MED ’21) received a Gruber Fellowship in Global Justice from the Yale School of Law. She will be working with the Partindo do Chão Coletivo research platform, a collective formed by non-Indigenous and Guaraní researchers and architects, coordinated by professor Glória Porto Kok at Escola da Cidade, in São Paulo, to improve the quality of housing in Tekoá Pyau village, one of six Guaraní villages at the foot of Jaraguá peak.

The project will research and document traditional construction techniques of the Guaraní Mbya; map Tekoá Pyau village housing conditions and the need for basic infrastructure such as sanitation and access to water; provide technical guidance for São Paulo zoning laws and produce a document as an instrument of negotiation with the city to prevent further real estate expansion on the Jaraguá Indigenous territory; build two housing prototypes; and launch a fundraising campaign to renew existing houses in the village.

Gustav Kjær Vad Nielsen (MArch ’22) participated in the UIA World Congress of Architects in Copenhagen on July 5, as part of the panel “Next Gen: Transition into Sustainability Practices.”

Juanita Castaneda Norena (BA ’23) won the Library Map Prize for her senior thesis in urban studies, “The Myth of Solidarity: The Formalization of Segregation and Externalization of Class through the Estate System in Cali, Colombia,” advised by Joyce Hsiang (BA ’99, MArch ’03). The prize “recognizes students whose senior essays or projects make use of one or more maps or charts in substantive ways.” The selection committee noted that this “exceptionally creative essay” skillfully integrated archival and newly created maps, scholarly research, and collage to examine social issues. Estrato, a housing-based socioeconomic stratification system in Colombia, was intended to create solidarity by distributing utility costs based on income. As the jury noted, Castaneda Norena’s “visual methodology” enables the reader to understand the history of Cali, its present-day issues, and how estrato has instead furthered inequality and segregation.

Clare Fentress (MArch ’23) received the Avery Review Essay Prize for her article “Staff Needs: The Spaces of Hospice,” which uses the Southern Connecticut Hospice, in Branford, as a case study to examine the architectural aspects of care.

Josh Greene (MArch ’23) and Christina Chi Zhang (MArch ’23) were nominated for Metropolis magazine’s Future100 Architecture Graduate Cohort. Chi Zhang was also named the Harry der Boghosian Fellow at the Syracuse University School of Architecture for the 2023–24 academic year. The fellowship allows early career practitioners the opportunity to spend the year developing a body of design research based on an area of interest while teaching.

Chucho Martínez Padres (BA ’23) curated an exhibition of George Kubler’s archive as part of the Senior Exhibit Fellowship at Yale Library. The Study of Things: George Kubler in Latin America is on view in the Sterling Library Exhibition Corridor from May 1 to October 8, 2023.

Constructs

Kapp Singer (BA ’23) received Yale’s John Addison Porter Prize, one of Yale College’s major prizes in the humanities, for his senior thesis Media Against the Fire, or How to Save the Forest for the Trees advised by Keller Easterling. Singer graduated summa cum laude from the History/Theory/ Urbanism track of the architecture major and was the only student in Yale College honored with the Exceptional Distinction in the Major award.

Nicole Niava (MArch ’24) received the 2023 John Belle Travel Fellowship. Her proposal was selected from a field of 30 applications by students from 16 schools.

Tom Hsu (MArch ’24) was awarded the 2023 Kohn Pedersen Fox Traveling Fellowship. Yale Environmental Humanities grants for the summer of 2023 were awarded to Austin Ehrhardt (MED ’24), for “Black Homesteads of the New Deal”; George Papamatthaiakis (MED ’23), for “Horizons after Tourism”; associate professor Elihu Rubin (BA ’99), for “New Haven Brownfields Opportunities Flyer”; and Kevin Yang (MArch ’24), for “New Haven, Revisited: An Anthology.”

Alumni Events On June 8 more than 100 alumni — residents of the Bay Area and those attending the AIA Conference on Architecture — gathered at the University Club of San Francisco. Representing class years between 1973 and 2023, they heard updates on the school from Dean Berke, including news on recent events and successes in fundraising for scholarships, as well as how the school is adjusting after the pandemic.

The Indigenous Society of Architecture, Planning, and Design (ISAPD), founded

by YSoA alumni Anjelica Gallegos (MArch ’21) and Charelle Brown (BA ’20), is a recipient of the 2023 Fulcrum Fund grant cycle for the First Future Project. The annual grant program was created and is administered by 516 ARTS as a partner in the Regional Regranting Program of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The First Future Project encompasses a range of programming targeted to sustaining the endeavors of the ISAPD and expanding on Indigenous architectural principles firmly rooted in the tracking of natural phenomena and celestial events, specifically the fall equinox. Programming includes a built installation, community art contribution, maps and drawings, a public festival, a design competition, and an online community book. The built installation is set to show in New York in the fall in collaboration with the Center for Architecture and partners.

Yale Women in Architecture (YWA) is an inclusive community led by graduates of the Yale School of Architecture that promotes excellence and equity in the field of architecture and related professions.

Earlier in the year YWA hosted a general meeting at Sage & Coombe Architects, in New York, bringing together a range of members both digitally and in person to connect. In June YWA hosted a celebration of the Jim Vlock First Year Building Project.

Bringing students and YWA members together at Atelier Cue, in New Haven, the event stimulated discussion around future modes of practice and sustainability in the built environment. During the next academic year the YWA hopes to connect and support alumi and current students through an intergenerational exchange of experiences and knowledge. YWA fosters women’s leadership and entrepreneurship in all facets of the ever-evolving profession of architecture and urbanism. Learn more at www.yalewomeninarchitecture.org.

If you would like your news to be featured in a future issue of Constructs, please send it via email to constructs@yale.edu. Constructs also keeps an eye on alumni press releases and stories elsewhere on the web, but a direct email is still the best way to make sure your news is included.

Carl Abbott on Architectural Travel Gabriel Hernández, Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Yale School of Architecture and PhD candidate at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, talks to Carl Abbott about introducing Norman Foster and Richard Rogers to American architecture and culture.

The following is an excerpt from a three-day interview with architect Carl Abbott FAIA (MArch ’62) conducted in Sarasota, Florida, in April 2023. This section focuses on Abbott’s insights into the significance of architectural travel as a pedagogical tool through his own American and European “grand tours” in the 1960s, when he played a crucial role in exposing American architecture and landscapes to his Yale classmates Norman Foster (MArch ’62) and Richard Rogers (MArch ’62). More than 50 years later Abbott generously guided me around Sarasota to visit local architectural gems, including many designed by Paul Rudolph and his own buildings. While on the road Abbott shared his sharp and witty perspective on his adventures as well as an appreciation of architecture and a trunk filled with books.

Born in Georgia and based in Florida since the 1950s, Carl Abbott is a fellow of the AIA and the youngest member of the “Sarasota School of Architecture,” with an extensive body of work that connects architecture, landscape, and art.

He enrolled in the master’s program at Yale in 1961. Soon after arriving, Rudolph appointed Abbott as the class representative in charge of organizing the visits of master’s students from Penn, Harvard, and MIT, as well as the corresponding Yale trips to those institutions. Yet Abbott is better known as the sole American in the British student gang that included Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Su Rogers (née Brumwell), who was enrolled at Yale’s Master of City Planning.

Rudolph’s intense studio schedule and the intellectual curiosity catalyzed by Vincent Scully’s lectures drove these new four friends to invest their semester breaks in traveling together to expand their horizons beyond Connecticut. During the winter and Easter breaks of 1962 Abbott became an architectural cicerone, leading an epic road trip west to Fallingwater, Chicago, and Taliesin. The group visited as

many Frank Lloyd Wright buildings as they could, along with works by Mies van der Rohe and Louis Sullivan.

After graduation Foster and Rogers worked briefly in California while Abbott worked in Hawaii, until, after the summer of 1963, they convinced Abbott to join them in London, where they had recently started working together as Team 4, testing the group dynamics developed at Yale. Abbott also traveled extensively throughout Europe, influenced by Scully’s teachings about the importance of traveling to experience architecture in its context. At the time students had to tailor their itineraries based on motivation and budget, whereas today Yale students receive generous support for travel, which has become a fundamental element of the school’s architectural pedagogy.

Gabriel Hernández Were you aware of Paul Rudolph’s academic program, teaching methods, or persona before you enrolled at Yale in 1961?

Carl Abbott I had no idea, except it was known by everybody that Rudolph had taught at a lot of different universities and had this reputation as a fighter. He was intense and demanding of himself and demanding of everybody around him. I had heard he was a tough professor and would make you work like you’ve never worked before, but I didn’t know it would be as intense as it was. As Richard Rogers said, “Yale is close to sailboats, and I love sailing. I’d do a lot of sailing, and New York was handy, so I thought we’d have a lot of fun in New York. But it was like an architectural army camp.” Rudolph was a little Napoleon in a way. I’ve never said that before.

GH Despite the intense work, you managed to get some time away from New Haven. As the only American in the group, how did you start showing your British colleagues around?

CA The only time we traveled was during breaks between projects and

semesters. Norman, Richard, Su, and I went to New York maybe only twice. We didn’t have time. But I took them to see more of America — we saw West Side Story and a few other movies and plays — and we went together to see a Yale-Harvard football game.

I couldn’t explain the game because I didn’t understand it, and they all thought it was so stupid. Then I took them to see ice hockey at the new Ingalls Rink, designed by Eero Saarinen — or as Scully referred to it, the pregnant turtle.

GH When did you make your first “architectural trip”?

CA In 1958 I was working on a project at the University of Florida. I kept talking about Wright’s gardens and houses in Chicago, in Oak Park. A professor, Bill Stewart, told me: “You need to go there.” I said, “Well, how do I pay to get there?” And then I won a small scholarship from the University of Florida and got a ride up north with a fraternity brother.

Later I took a train and hitchhiked part of the way out to Taliesin. In Chicago, taking Wright books with me, I would sit on the sidewalk in the freezing cold to study the building. Some things had changed a lot, but you could still imagine the original building while checking early photographs. This trip acted as a footprint for the one we did four years later.

GH Is this how you customized your travels, by taking books with you?

CA Yes. A year after graduating from Yale, I went to England with the thought of getting a scholarship and staying there to study and look at buildings. I then planned to travel around Europe for several months, so I took tons of books from America with me.

I took Scully’s book too.

GH Was it The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, about Greek sacred architecture?

CA Yes, it was published while we were at Yale. Scully’s seminars were significantly related to that content. His lectures were intense, but the book is much more intense. Although Scully didn’t say, “Why don’t you all go out to Chicago?”

He never said that. Never. And no one else in our class traveled. I remember that when we got to Fallingwater, everything was locked. Having been there before, I knew we could get a flyover, which we did, but we got caught. Su talked them into showing us around the property. As Norman explained at Yale during the 2008 building reopening, “We were a little group, just the four of us. We were almost like a band.

We looked at buildings and studied them as ferociously as we could.” After graduation, when Norman and Richard were working in California for some months, I joined them for a shot time to visit buildings in the Bay Area and Los Angeles.

GH To what extent would the books you had shape your travels?

Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, and Carl Abbott visit Louis Kahn’s Esherick House in Philadelphia. Image provided by the Norman Foster Foundation Archive.

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CA When I returned from traveling for three months in Italy and Greece, in 1964, I brought back a lot of books. And I took more books than clothes going from America to Europe. I didn’t buy much in England though prices were reasonable in those days for Americans.

GH How long were you in England?

CA Nine months with Team 4, and a total of one year between England and Europe. When I first got to England Su picked me up at the airport, and soon after I joined all of them on holiday at her parent’s house in Cornwall. None of the early Team 4 projects, such as Creek Vean, were there yet. So I said: “I didn’t come to England to go on holiday. I came to see Europe and England.” I returned to London after stopping at Stonehenge, packed all my stuff, and went to Europe.

I took off for Spain because I wanted to see Gaudí’s work in Barcelona, and I wanted to see some of Corb’s work in France. I did not speak any other language, but I traveled with a series of books called Europe on 5 Dollars a Day, which would tell you the cheapest, safest, and unsafest hotels.

I loved Barcelona. I remember that women in Spain and Italy wore black clothes — things had not progressed that rapidly since the war. There were still bombed-out parts of London.

GH When did you get back to London?

CA In July 1963 I went back and applied for scholarships. I remember I was already working with Team 4 when Kennedy died [November 22, 1963] because Norman and Wendy came to my apartment to give me the news. Norman and Richard were trying to help me get jobs, and we all taught occasionally at the AA and Regent Street Polytechnic. And then they said: “Well, why don’t you work with us? We got a few small mews housing projects and the several Creek Vean projects.” So that’s when I started working with them at Team 4. It was never the intention to come and start the office with them, but they needed help getting it going. Then I got my VW bug. I went to Italy and Greece, driving with a couple of AA students who later worked with Norman, to help pay for expenses.

They were with me for a week. I went to Ronchamp and La Tourette again, and then straight to Italy. I had all my books in the back of the VW. I would sleep on beaches or at youth hostels.

GH How long were you traveling this time?

CA It could have been three months, and I enjoyed every part, especially Greece.

I learned so much from that trip; it was so meaningful. This was the kind of trip that you’ll always remember. Interestingly the last time I saw Richard was at Team 4’s fiftieth-anniversary celebration in London, in 2016, and he called to ask if I’d like to have lunch with him at his apartment before the party. And I will never forget what he said about the Wright-Chicago trip we did as students: “That’s the most important architectural trip I ever did.”

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