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Architecture
dean will design new colleges
November/December 2008
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
What
will Yale’s 13th and 14th residential colleges look like? Their architect isn’t
saying yet, at least not exactly. “I think it’s safe to say they’ll look like
Yale residential colleges,” says School of Architecture dean Robert A. M. Stern
'65MArch, whose firm was selected in September to design the colleges.
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Stern has exerted great influence over what gets built on campus and how.
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Stern's
220-person New York office is best known for buildings in traditional historic
styles, from sumptuous Shingle Style houses in the Hamptons to the
Colonial-style Norman Rockwell Museum. He says that building in styles of the
earlier colleges, most of which were designed in the 1930s by architect James
Gamble Rogers, is “perfectly possible.” Stern cites as an example a
“sympathetic” addition his firm designed for a Rogers dormitory at the Taft
School. His firm has also done Georgian-style buildings for the University of
Virginia and the Harvard Business School.
The
colleges, which are scheduled to open in 2013, will be built north of the Grove
Street Cemetery on a triangular site bordered by Prospect, Canal, and Sachem
streets. Their construction will make possible a 15 percent expansion of Yale’s
undergraduate enrollment, from 5,250 students to around 6,000.
Stern
was in some ways an obvious choice for the job: since becoming dean in 1998, he
has been heavily involved in campus planning, and he has exerted great
influence over what gets built on campus and how. “His knowledge of Yale and
its architectural tradition is deep and profound,” said President Richard Levin
in announcing Stern’s selection.
Stern
says he has already begun learning from the earlier colleges. “The brilliance
of the colleges does not reside only in their style,” he says. “The style is
almost secondary to the brilliance of the urbanism of the colleges. We're
trying to take all that into consideration in designing the buildings.”
Stern
says he has also been looking at Rogers’s papers in the Yale library, which
include postcard views of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge that the
architect used for inspiration. “Rogers had never been to Oxford and Cambridge
before he designed the colleges,” says Stern. “I’ve been there, so I guess in
that sense I have a leg up.”  |
