Yale School of Management, New Haven, USA
for
role
status
year
DS+R
Project Leader
Competition
2007
The proposed 230,000 sf building houses the new business school designed as a self-contained campus. The proposed building interprets two traditional hallmarks of Yale campus architecture: the courtyard and the domestic scale of academic space. To approach the intimacy of SOM’s existing fractured home on Hillside Avenue, the new building program is subdivided into smaller building blocks, each defined by a primary use: the instructional bar, the administrative stack, the library and student wedges, and the faculty spurs. The eight building units range in area from 15,000 sf to 68,000 sf.
The new campus-within-a-campus begins with a void and builds outward. A beautifully proportioned outdoor room or Commons is encircled by a glazed passerelle that strings together the program units. The larger, more public units line Whitney Avenue and the smaller, more private ones are oriented toward the residential street––all, descend with the topography. Like guests at a dinner table, the building units large and small face inward across the Commons in collegial dialogue.
The passerelle is the lifeblood of the school: a continuous light-filled space that connects all the activities of the building physically and visually. The passerelle is not only a place of motion, it swells into lounges and breakout spaces. As such, it is a hang-out, the new “hall of mirrors” dedicated to the unscheduled and unplanned, where the social and academic converge.
Old and new building materials and technologies find a new blend. Masonry walls vignette from clay bricks to glass bricks to brick voids, dematerializing solid walls into transparent walls, porous screens and airy crevices. To avoid obsolescence, the building is a supple shell that anticipates the continuous updating of state-of-the-art technologies. In alignment with its progressive mission, the new identity for the School of Management will be represented by an architecture of transparency, permeable edges, intimacy, diversity, and interaction.
