Franken-Yale: Overseas Expansion by Pelli Clarke Pelli Draws Criticism
Pelli Clarke Pelli’s design for Yale’s new campus in Singapore. (Courtesy Yale-NUS)
Yale University is under fire from its own faculty for a new collaboration with the National University of Singapore (NUS). Pelli Clarke Pelli is designing the campus of what will be a four-year liberal arts college based in Singapore. A recent Reuters article reported that the project has “stirred sharp criticism from faculty and human-rights advocates who say it is impossible to build an elite college dedicated to free inquiry in an authoritarian nation with heavy restrictions on public speech and assembly.”
Degrees issued by the Singapore-based college, called Yale-NUS, won’t be Yale degrees and technically it’s not considered a Yale branch campus. Yet is Yale guilty of selling out its values—the school’s motto is lux et veritas, “light and truth”—to extend its brand? As Reuters reported, “Christopher Miller, a professor of French and African American studies, has dubbed the venture ‘Frankenyale.’” The faculty began to voice their objections last spring, but may have been too slow on the draw—the new campus is well under construction and set to open this summer.
Space and Time Expanding at Yale Art Gallery
Yale University Art Gallery (left to right: Louis Kahn building, Old Yale Art Gallery building, Street Hall). (Christopher Gardner)
Few university art museums have holdings that span from 3000-year old Chinese bronze vessels to bronze coins of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, and from the blue-tiled gates of ancient Babylon to Blam, a red, white, and blue oil painting by Roy Lichtenstein. The collections of the Yale University Art Gallery, both deep and wide-ranging, offer up an impressive art-fueled time machine, and thanks to the Gallery’s current expansion project by Ennead, visitors will be able to travel more easily than ever across history and cultures.
Is Drawing Dead? Yale Searches for an Answer
Panelists Greg Lynn, Preston Scott Cohen, and Marion Weiss. (Erik Herrmann)
Is drawing dead? That was the burning question (and title) of last weekend’s symposium at the Yale School of Architecture, which assessed the contemporary state of drawing through three days of lectures and panels, with pen-and-paper proponents from across the architectural spectrum. This convergence of many great drawers past and present coincided with the recently opened exhibition Massimo Scolari: The Representation of Architecture, a largely drawing-based show on view through May 4 in the School of Architecture Gallery.
Deborah Berke’s Yale Studio Exploring Urban Manufacturing (and Bourbon)
A stack of whiskey barrels. (Project 404 / Flickr)
American manufacturing may be on the rocks, but Deborah Berke, principal at Deborah Berke & Partners, believes that by adding a little bourbon, one Kentucky city can make an industrial comeback. Berke is leading a graduate studio at Yale exploring the future of boutique manufacturing in the United States and using an urban distillery in Louisville as a case study.
On View> Gwathmey Siegel at the Yale School of Architecture
deMenil Residence, west façade, 1983. (Norman McGrath)
Gwathmey Siegel:
Inspiration and Transformation
Yale School of Architecture Gallery
New Haven
Through January 2012
The first show to present the work of Gwathmey Siegel and Associates, Inspiration and Transformation at the Yale School of Architecture explores the connection between architecture and art over eight firm projects. Those selected are a diverse group, represented by a range of mediums that include sketches, blueprints, models, photographs (of the de Menil House, above), and drawings, and personal documents. But the emphasis falls on the firm’s institutional work: the renovations and additions to Yale School of Architecture’s Paul Rudolph Hall; the Guggenheim Museum annex and renovation, the renovation of Whig Hall at Princeton, and the Busch Reisinger addition to the Fogg Museum at Harvard University. Also on display are pieces of Gwathmey’s personal archive, Europe travel sketchbooks, and student work at Yale.
On View> Ceci N’est Pas Une Reverie: The Architecture of Stanley Tigerman
Formica axonometric by Stanley Tigerman. (Courtesy Yale School of Architecture)
Ceci n’est pas une reverie:
The Architecture of Stanley Tigerman
Yale School of Architecture
180 York Street
New Haven, CT
Through November 4
The exhibition Ceci n’est pas une reverie (“This is not a dream”) celebrates the work of architect Stanley Tigerman. Curated by Yale School of Architecture Associate Professor Emmanuel Petit, this retrospective tells the story of Tigerman’s professional career, beginning with his years at Yale as an undergraduate and then a graduate student in architecture. Organized around several motifs—utopia, allegory, death, humor, and division—the exhibition includes models and objects, documents, cartoons, sketches, and drawings, like an axonometric of formica, above. Video material from lectures and interviews also capture Tigerman’s eclectic style as it has evolved over the past 50 years, encompassing his early work at the Chicago-based firm Tigerman McCurry Architects and his return to Yale as a visiting professor. Ceci n’est pas une reverie will coincide with the publication of Tigerman’s collected writings, 1964-2011 Schlepping Through Ambivalence, Essays on an American Architectural Condition, and his autobiography Designing Bridges to Burn as well as a series of lectures at the Yale School of Architecture.
Quick Clicks> Capping Highways, Flying Meteors, Infrastructure Pop, Old School Ivy
Proposed highway-straddling structure in Santa Monica. (Courtesy Curbed)
Capping Santa Monica. Curbed LA got some great renderings from students at USC who where charged with imagining even more highway caps for the Pacific Coast Highway, this time from Arizona to California Avenues. Beyond freeway parks, the students proposed housing, hotels, and community centers.
Breaking Whitney. With the deal signed for the Met to take over the Whitney‘s Breuer building on Madison, directors at the ground breaking for the new branch at the High Line had all the more reason to celebrate. DNA reminds readers that the museum is actually retuning home. Ol’ Gerty got the ball rolling on 8th Street way back in 1930.
Dylan Sings. Happy B-day Bobby! Bob Dylan turned 70 on Tuesday and in celebration the Infrastructurist presents Dylan’s Ten Best Infrastructure Songs, including “The Levee’s Gonna Break” and “Marchin’ to the City.”
Old School. Design New Haven has the Robert A.M. Stern drawings for “street calming measures” at Yale that are part of the $600 million for renovations, including two new residential colleges. The plan includes mixed use buildings intended to encourage street life at all hours and improved access to the Farmington Canal Greenway .
Two Routes to Poster Art
John Hassall, No need to ask a P’liceman, 1908, lithograph, London Transport Museum, © TfL from the London Transport Museum Collection
Well, this is embarrassing: the MoMA and the Yale Center for British Art have nearly simultaneously come out with exhibitions on the same subject. In museum-world, isn’t that like two girls showing up to a party in the same dress?
Nevertheless, it’s an interesting enough topic that the repetition hardly matters. The Yale Center’s “Art For All: British Posters For Transport,” on view through August 15, and the MoMA’s “Underground Gallery: London Transport Posters 1920s-1940s,” on view through February 28, 2011, both offer a fascinating look at London’s innovative campaign to bring art into the Underground and create a strong civic identity. Read More
Eavesdrop NY 16
Brangelina shopping for gerbils for the kids. The furry little things—no, not the kids—would soon occupy an $82,000 Rodentopia. (Courtesy Yeeeah.com)
WE SMELL RATS
Really? The British tabloids (all of them) are reporting that architectural fetishist and actor, Brad Pitt, has built a gerbil “Neverland” for his six children’s herd on his and Angelina’s estate in the South of France. If you believe what they’re reporting, Pitt paid somewhere between $50,000 and $80,000 on an “elaborate gerbil run [that] has a maze of tunnels, seesaws, and platforms for the pets to live in,” according to ever-present anonymous sources. Pets? Gerbils are rodents. Besides, what do gerbils know about architecture? Eavesdrop wants to see the Rodentia brief, renderings, reflected-ceiling and sprinkler plans, specs, etc. Read More
Frat Trashes Rudolph’s House
Following a renovation by the fraternity that occupied it, all most all traces of Paul Rudolph have vanished from his New Haven home. (Calgary Leveen/Yale Daily News)
One could make a living chronicling the iniquities visited upon the work of Paul Rudolph (lord knows we certainly have). From modest tract homes to cutting edge office towers, the trail-blazing, highly influential architect’s work has not fared well of late. Of the handful already demolished, as many are on the chopping block, and it has become an ongoing struggle for the Paul Rudolph Foundation to protect what’s left. One of the better projects to come along was the expansion of Rudolph’s Art & Architecture Building at Yale, where he taught for so long. But it now turns out that that was not the only renovation of the great architect’s work going on in New Haven. Read More
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