JEWEL BOXES: A sparkly new architectural gem on the Yale University campus

I was fortunate to attend my nephew's recent graduation from the Yale School of Management, which opened its stunning, super-modern new facility in January of 2014. The 240,000-square-foot building is wonderfully bright and airy, with inviting smaller spaces tucked in here and there, and a gracious central courtyard that serves as its organizing feature. My grad school certainly didn't look anything like this!

Main entrance and front of Yale SOM

The building has been called 

"the newest version of the Starship Enterprise"

Yale's campus has long been known as a living history of architecture (three centuries' worth.) Some of the world's greatest architects -- James Gamble Rogers, Louis I. Kahn, Eero Saarinen, Philip Johnson, Cesar Pelli, and Frank Gehry -- are represented in its buildings, which in various ways express "the struggle to balance collective identity and individual expression -- the essential struggle of life in a democracy."

Edward P. Evans Hall was designed by Foster + Partners, the prominent firm chaired by Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate Lord Norman Foster, a 1962 graduate of the Yale School of Architecture. Below are more artists' renderings of the building.

Concourse overlooking the courtyard, classrooms on right

               “Theater-in-the-round” classroom

Exterior view of classrooms (blue pods)

Student lounge

° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° °

And below ... the University of Glasgow Art History 

building, where I did a graduate programme

in decorative arts

Hmmm ... looking at it now, it doesn't seem so bad ...

just kind of dark and stodgy ...

Luckily, it was very close to

The Willow Tea Room, designed in 1903

by Charles Rennie Mackintosh

!!!!!!!!!

~ oOo ~