Yale School of Architecture Announces Spring Events

New Haven, Conn. — A symposium examining the “Market of Effects” in contemporary architecture, an exhibition articulating the mystique of design firm UNStudio and lectures by urban planning theorist Susan Fainstein, celebrated landscape designer Adriaan Geuze, UNStudio principal Ben van Berkel and the post-modernist prophet Charles Jencks are among the events planned at the Yale School of Architecture for the end of the spring term.

All events are free and open to the public and take place in the Art & Architecture Building, 180 York St. Lectures begin at 6:30 p.m. in Hastings Hall in the basement of the A & A Building. The Gallery is open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The Gallery is closed on Sunday.

Continuing to May 4
The current exhibition in the Gallery of the Art & Architecture building showcases the revolutionary approach to construction and design developed by the innovative Amsterdam-based firm UNStudio. Originating in the Deutsches Architektur Museum (German Architecture Museum), this exhibition, “UNStudio: Evolution of Space,” focuses on five projects that exemplify the firm’s prototype “design models,” or planning strategies, derived from digital technology. For example, their submission to a competition for a redevelopment on Manhattan’s West Side represents their holistic “Deep Planning” approach; the double-helix shape of their heralded new Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart primarily typifies the “Mathematical Model.” The exhibition installation, which brings to life the firm’s principles, is helpful, if not essential, to understand the revolutionary “gestalt” of UNStudio and to experience first-hand the new reality their application of digital technology has effected. Ben van Berkel, director and co-founder with Caroline Bos of UNStudio, will deliver a public lecture at the School of Architecture on April 12.


March 26
Susan Fainstein, who teaches in the urban planning and design department at Harvard, will be the first speaker at the Yale School of Architecture following the spring break. She will deliver the Eero Saarinen Lecture, which she has titled “The Just City.”

March 30–31
The School of Architecture will host a student-led symposium, “The Market of Effects,” exploring the cultural, aesthetic and ethical ramifications of a consumer-driven architecture. Second-year students in the Master of Environmental Design (M.E.D.) program at Yale have invited graduate and professional school students and researchers from around the country to discuss the state of architecture as its increasing service to commerce diverts its aesthetic mission. The symposium will examine how the built environment, wedded to multi-media technology, becomes effectively a “personalized point of sale” and what this trend says about the aspirations of architecture and signals for its future. The keynote address for the symposium will be delivered by Mark Gottdiener on March 30, 6:30 p.m. Gottdiener is a distinguished professor of sociology at the University of Buffalo and the author of the groundbreaking text on the commercialization of urban space, “The Theming of America: American Dreams, Media Fantasies and Themed Environment.” His talk is titled “Foreground/Background: Architecture as Sign and the Culture of Theming.”

April 2
Belinda Tato and José Luis Vallejo, principals of the architecture and engineering firm [ecosistema urbano], will give a talk about their innovative work designing and building structures and developing the urban environment sustainably: “Recycling the Non-City.”

April 5
Mack Scogin of Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects will give a talk titled “The Rhinoceros Next Door.”

April 9
Ljiljana Blagojevic, an authority on the modern architecture of Serbia, will lecture on the subject of the “New Belgrade.”

April 12
Ben van Berkel (see above) will deliver the Paul Rudolph Lecture, “Everything Is Curved.”

April 17
Critic and visionary Charles Jencks will lecture on “Critical Modernism.” An early proponent of the tenets of post-modernism, Jencks is author of “Architecture 2000” (1971), “Modern Movements in Architecture” (1972), “The Language of Post-Modern Architecture” (1977), “What Is Post-Modernism?” (1986), “The Architecture of the Jumping Universe” (1995), “Millennium Architecture” (2000) and “The Garden of Cosmic Speculation” (2003), to name only a portion of his extensive bibliography. He contributes regularly to professional journals and lectures to audiences throughout the world. A frequent guest on television programs in the UK and the U.S., Jencks is also the author of two feature films for the BBC. As a practitioner, he is known primarily as a premier landscape architect who embodies in his work such physical and biological fundamentals as chaos theory, fractals, waves and genetics. His sculpted design for the grounds of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, “Landform,” and his private garden, the “Garden of Cosmic Speculation,” are celebrated landmarks in the UK.

April 23
One day after Earth Day, one of the planet’s most innovative designers of outdoor urban space, Adriaan Geuze, will deliver the Timothy Egan Lenahan Memorial Lecture, “Paradise Lost.” West 8, the Rotterdam-based firm of which Geuze is a partner, counts among the sites of its most noteworthy designs the courtyard of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Buena Vista Park in Singapore and the Canal Island in Bruges, Belgium.

May 18 to June 1
The annual exhibition of student work will be the final show in the Art & Architecture building until the completion of an extensive renovation and restoration of the famed landmark in 2008.