Photo: Rafael Ng

Walking up Chapel Street, in downtown New Haven, an uncannily familiar form becomes visible inside the large windows of Paul Rudolph Hall. There is a massive yellow curve, illuminated like a neon billboard, and it isn’t until you pass directly beneath the entrance to the building that you realize you are looking at a full-scale McDonald’s golden arch. People gather on the sidewalk and stare in confusion. An adjacent poster offers clarification: What We Learned, a new exhibition at the Yale School of Architecture, returns Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and their legendary 1968 Las Vegas studio to Yale for a much-anticipated 40-year reunion. Read more…

Every Monday until August, first-year graduate students at the Yale School of Architecture are blogging about their progress building an affordable, accessible owner-renter residence in New Haven. Click here to read the previous posts.

The front view of the house as of last Friday, with last year’s house looking on. Photos: courtesy the Vlock First Year Building Project

“Could we PLEASE forget about last year’s house?” The question, hopelessly optimistic, comes from our program director, Adam, during a recent class meeting to decide on finish materials for the house. A student had defended his opinion on our roof color based on its relationship to last year’s house, and Adam wasn’t buying it. Some in the class nod in agreement. Others roll their eyes. Yet Adam’s resolve to make construction decisions independent of influence from the 2008 project is not nearly as simple as it might seem—in fact, the relationship of the two houses has spawned a continuous stream of debate since the design selection in early May. Read more…

Every Monday until August, first-year graduate students at the Yale School of Architecture will be blogging about their progress building an affordable, accessible owner-renter residence in New Haven. In this first installment, Matthew Zych reports on the rocky transition period between the selection of the winning student design and the start of construction.

Dean Robert A. M. Stern leads a lively discussion during the design selection. Images: courtesy the Yale Building Project

The phase “revisions to winning design” sounds entirely too innocent. The weeks following final design reviews in architecture schools are generally characterized by a welcome reduction in pace and panic of the students—and yet here we stand a week after a crowd packed into a final studio review to watch our critics and clients select a student-designed house to be constructed for the 2009 Yale Building Project, and the anxiety in the studio has not tapered in the slightest. As we work on revisions to the chosen scheme, the “we’re done!” feeling we so long for after a final semester review has been absorbed by the sobering reality that we now need to bring 48 ambitious and diverse students to a consensus on how to move this project from paper to a building. It gets better: we break ground in one week. Read more…