Yale School of Management Project Wends Its Way Through New Haven Governance

Last week New Haven's Board of Alderman's Legislation Committee approved the proposed plan for the new Yale School of Management building. The plan had been previously approved by the City Plan Commission. Its next step is the full Board of Alderman.
This article is illuminating about the procedural steps a private institution may need to take when looking for permission for large capital projects.

Dickson, who is a Yale School of Architecture graduate, voiced a common theme of opponents: That the 237,000 square-foot building is “one giant box” and “out of scale” with the neighborhood.

There were spirited calls for downsizing, for opening the courtyard to the public on the Whitney side, for shifting delivery and driveways to the north side; and queries as to whether Yale had truly considered adaptive reuse of the buildings at 155 and 175 Whitney, which it plans to demolish to build the new home.

Presenting a Power Point and bird’s eye views of the site showing a structure lording it over the area, Farwell also questioned the accuracy of Yale’s submitted drawings and whether Yale’s outreach to the community for its input was “limited to the abutting area [only], not the impact area.”

Yale’s chief planner for the project, Laura Cruickshank, said Farwell’s bird’s eye views were misleading. They were for birds, she said. There were no people in them. First and foremost, she said, a building must work, not only look elegant, and the SOM as presented does. SOM professors and a dean described a crying need for a single, consolidating structure for its far-flung educational units and expansion by 100 students.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

Yale's Green Ark

SCUP–45 offers LUs for AIA.

Kroon Hall is the new home of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES). As you might expect, there is an excellent Yale website about Kroon Hall, with plenty of information about the concept and design. Michael J. Crosbie reviews the new building for Architecture Week:

Every so often, an exceptional work of architecture emerges from an opportune convergence of just the right client working with just the right team of architects, engineers, and consultants on a building that is just right for the times.

and:

Yale estimates that the green premium on the $33.5 million construction cost was about five percent.

It is hard to imagine a work of architecture better wedded to a client. And one can't help but wonder if the arklike shape of Kroon Hall isn't some unintentional but highly appropriate metaphor for a rescue ship and the salvation it offers as the polar ice caps continue to melt.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

Return of the Trays at Yale

Symbolic of resistance to change for sustainability, going trayless in the dining hall at Yale met with semi-organized student resistance, apparently strongest among athletes, so the trays are back:

The football team has been particularly vocal about the need for trays, Commons General Manager Thomas Peterlik said. Some members of the team did not clear their plates after one meal this week, Peterlik said, instead leaving them in a towering stack at the end of a table in protest. Two members of the team denied knowledge of the incident.

Yale University & the Age of Diminishing Endowments

A Wall Street Journal interview with Richard Levin, president of Yale University. It's focused at first on the effect of diminished endowments on rich school's resource and budget planning. It also covers a lot of ground regarding the history of Yale's relationship with the city of New Haven.

"We had a run that was historically unprecedented, and at the tail end of that it looked like we were getting too rich," Mr. Levin says, recalling that members of Congress were then starting to complain about rich private universities' "hoarding" money. "Well, that's quickly been amended," he deadpans."

Read the article here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124425383780391015.html

This is a nice review of the restored Art & Architecture Building at Yale University, written by Michael J. Crosbie. You should be able to read it all, but to enjoy most of the images you'll need to be an Architecture Week subscriber:

The Yale Art and Architecture building in New Haven, Connecticut, designed by legendary architect Paul Rudolph and completed in 1963, is now close to how its architect intended it to be, after a 45-year journey through celebration, fire, indifference, and abuse.

One of the most iconic architecture school buildings in the world, the object of a love-hate relationship with those who have known it, has found new repose amid a complex mixture of adoration, restoration, and exhilaration.

The restoration of Rudolph's masterwork, and the addition of an adjoining building for the art history department, are the work of New York architect Charles Gwathmey, a former student of Rudolph's who actually worked on the original building. The $126 million effort was guided by Yale's architecture dean, Robert A.M. Stern, who as a Yale student in the 1960s gave tours of Rudolph's concrete castle of architecture.

The Art & Architecture Addition - at Yale: What Would You Have Done?

In The Chronicle of Higher Education's Buildings & Grounds Blog, Lawrence Biemiller writes that he is certain that the addition to Paul Rudolph’s Art & Architecture Building is "going to start fights." Speaking of the addition's architect, Charles Gwathmey, Biemiller writes, "If your building’s a success, it succeeds by not overpowering Rudolph’s—so he still gets the lion’s share of the credit. But if your building is deemed a failure, you get blamed for messing up Rudolph’s masterpiece. At best, your assignment is thankless. . . . Once the cranes are out of the way and the fences come down early this summer, you can decide for yourself whether you think he chose the right course. The drawings don’t really do it justice, by the way—you’ll want to see it in person. In any case, Mr. Gwathmey deserves a lot credit for taking on so daunting an assignment. Rudolph should be proud.

Big-Time Renovation and Heritage Preservation Project at Yale Nears Completion

It is the Art & Architecture Building renovations that are thr subject of Lawrence Biemiller's post in The Chronicle of Higher Education's Buildings & Grounds Blog:

[I]t has been “a project with a thousand surprises” — partly because Rudolph’s contract with the university had permitted him to make an unlimited number of changes, many of them undocumented, while the building was under construction. Most famously, perhaps, the eight-story building ended up with 37 levels, counting a multi-level terrace, stair landings for which Rudolph designed bench seats, and a penthouse with spectacular views of the Yale campus. The complexity of the renovation, along with Mr. Stern and Mr. Gwathmey’s insistence on living up to Rudolph’s high standards, accounts for its $126-million price tag.

Renovating a (Mostly) Unloved Art & Architecture Building at Yale

Buildings that some people don't like are in the news a lot, lately.

A $130M renovation and expansion of the Art & Architecture Building at Yale University has some people scratching their heads and talking about a building that "was not beloved by anyone who was not an architecture student or faculty member" and is only still standing "because it would be too expensive to tear down." The article is by Lawrence Biemiller and in in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The image at left is from a page of images of this building published by Mary Ann Sullivan.

When the time came to decide between renovation and demolition, though, the building's unpopularity was outweighed by concerns about sustainability — tearing down a usable building is a LEED no-no — and by preservation advocates' newfound interest in well-known Modern structures. The renovation of the Art & Architecture Building comes on the heels of the Kahn gallery's $44-million renovation by Polshek Partnership Architects. Plans are also in the works for renovations of Eero Saarinen's two Yale residential colleges, Morse and Ezra Stiles, as well as of the 1963 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.

"Yale was a leader in the 1950s in building Modernist buildings," Mr. Stern said, "and now it's a leader in restoring them." But each, he said, "presents gargantuan problems to its owners."

So far, though, the problems almost all appear to have been resolvable. Mr. Stern pointed out with glee that the Art & Architecture Building's notorious orange carpet is being replaced with new carpet woven especially for the project. "It's coming back," he grinned, "in its full orangeneity."

Yale Purchases 136-acre Bayer Campus for Research

This article, "At Yale, A New Campus Just for Research," is from The New York Times by Karen W. Arenson, and may require registration for access:

Yale took what it hopes will be a giant step forward in that race with its announcement last month that it would buy the 136-acre campus of Bayer HealthCare, which straddles the line between West Haven and Orange, Conn., seven miles from downtown New Haven and the university’s main campus.

Additional information is available on the website of Yale's Office of Public Affairs. Also, we haven't found anything about this on the facilities website at Yale, but you may want to take a look at some of the major projects that are on there.