Every year, students at Yale design and build a single-family home in a low-income neighborhood. Called the Vlock Building Project, it’s one of the longest-standing and most admired public-interest design-build programs in the US. Unfortunately, it’s under threat. A/N reports professor Paul Brouard was assaulted and robbed on-site in Mid-May (he has since recovered). Despite the desires of dept. head Robert A.M. Stern, Yale University demanded the project be abandoned and re-located to an approved neighborhood. Did Yale make the right decision? Let us know what you think after the break.
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) College of Fellows has awarded Bimal Mendis and Joyce Hsiang of the Yale School of Architecture and Plan B Architecture & Urbanism, LLC the 2013 Latrobe Prize of $100,000 for their proposal, “The City of 7 Billion.” The research will study the impact of population growth and resource consumption on the built and natural environment at the scale of the entire world as a single urban entity. An antidote to the fragmentary analyses of current practices, this project will remove arbitrary boundaries and reframe the entire world as a continuous topography of development: the city of 7 billion.
The grant, named for architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, is awarded biennially by the AIA College of Fellows for research leading to significant advances in the architecture profession.
More on “The City of 7 Billion” after the break...
Inspired by the 13th International Architecture Exhibition‘s theme Common Ground, Peter Eisenman has formed a team to revisit, examine and reimagine Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s 1762 folio collection of etchings, Campo Marzio dell’antica Roma. Derived from years of fieldwork spent measuring the remains of ancient Roman buildings, these six etchings depict Piranesi’s fantastical vision of what ancient Rome might have looked like and represent a landmark in the shift from a traditionalist, antiquarian view of history to the scientific, archaeological view.
Eisenman’s team consists of Eisenman Architects, students from Yale University, Jeffrey Kipnis with his colleagues and students of the Ohio State University, and Belgian architecture practice, Dogma. Each group has contributed a response to Piranesi’s work through models and drawings that stimulate discourse on contemporary architecture. In particular, they explore architecture’s relationship to the ground and the political, social, and philosophical consequences that develop from that relationship.
Described as “precise, specific, yet impossible”, Piranesi’s images have been a source of speculation, inspiration, research and contention for architects, urban designers and scholars since their publication 250 years ago. Continue after the break to learn more.
In an effort to explore the auditory dimension of architecture, Yale School of Architecture is presenting the J. Irwin Miller Symposium: ‘The Sound of Architecture’ which will take place October 4-6. Free and open to the public, the symposium will draw on experts from a variety of disciplines in its quest for an understanding of architecture as an auditory environment. The three-day event will begin with remarks by Professor Forster, who will present key examples of relevant historical issues as well as of buildings with characteristic sonic properties. This will be followed by a lecture by architect Brigitte Shim (Shim-Sutcliffe Architects, Toronto), who will describe the architectural calibration of a house designed for a mathematician and amateur musician. Friday will encompass four sessions, which will address the phenomenology of listening, and there will be two sessions on Saturday, one on the soundscapes of cities and the politics of urban noise and another examining the affect of sound on the aesthetic and social character of space. To register and for more information, please visit here.
As we all know, natural disasters continue to kill hundreds of thousands each year, and the vast growth of cities with unsafe and unreliable buildings and other infrastructure will only increase the cost of human life and negatively impact local economies. To address this, The Campaign for Safe Buildings, along with The Rubin Foundation and the Yale School of Architecture, is hosting a symposium November 4th and 5th to look closely at safe building initiatives around the world and many of the challenges that stand in the way of keeping natural disasters from turning into man-made catastrophes. More information on the event after the break.
