After nine years and $135 million, the Yale Art Galleries on the university’s campus in New Haven, Connecticut, have reopened to display the treasures you more typically find in a big-city museum. The project is the culmination of a campus-wide arts master plan that has taken 17 years and $500 million. — bloomberg.com

Balance. For decades we’ve had an art culture that tries to wow us with too muchness — blockbusters, biennials, bank-breaking museum buildings no one needs — and that ends up delivering way too little. Could it be that the day of just enough is upon us, and that Yale’s just right museum is a bellwether? — NYT

From Friday evening to Saturday afternoon, 180 alumnae and current female students alike will gather at the school to discuss issues such as evolving design practices and the intersection of architecture and activism, School of Architecture Dean Robert A.M. Stern said. But the symposium’s larger goal is to allow graduates to share their experiences as women architects, he explained. — yaledailynews.com

In the lecture series “Context and Collaboration” given by Paul Makovsky of Metropolis Magazine, Pullman and architect Jane Thompson of the Thompson Design Group, Nelson was described as rejecting the Howard Roark paradigm of the “hero architect” due to his socially conscious approach and his choice to work on interiors during the mid-20th century when furniture design was considered “feminine.” — yaledailynews.com

Last week, Raj Patel, principal and acoustic consultant at Arup treated the crowd at Yale School of Architecture’s Sound of Architecture Symposium to a presentation on his company’s Sound Lab. The Sound Lab uses a battery of speakers arranged in a spherical configuration to mimic the acoustic properties of a digital architectural model. In real time, designers can change the shape of a hall, the material of the seats, the angle of the walls, and hear how it might affect the acoustics... — metropolismag.com

“We don’t believe architecture can solve anything,” Andraos said of the relationship between environmentalism and design in WORKac’s creations. “Rather, we feel this is a question of impacting culture. In the architect’s Sisyphean relation to power, we believe in the visionary, and his agency to radicalize and to move culture.” — yaledailynews.com

In 2008, while conducting research on the work of celebrated modernist Kevin Roche (b. 1922), Yale School of Architecture associate professor Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen conducted a series of interviews with the architect in his Hamden, Connecticut, home. She included selections from the interviews in Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment (Yale University Press, 2011), the monograph published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name. — nbm.org

Yale’s new undergraduate architecture program treads a fine line between Yale College’s liberal arts philosophy and the preprofessional culture of its home in the Architecture School’s Rudolph Hall. Due to the major’s rigorous coursework early on and focus on production, six undergraduate students in the major interviewed said that they feel the program is more “preprofessional” than other majors at Yale. — yaledailynews.com

This past Monday the anti-establishment infiltrated Yale School of Architecture in a dashing gold scarf. Seducing the audience with a breathless stream of “Frenglish,” whose charm derived from the speaker’s sheer enthusiasm for his subject, François Roche rose to a god-like status typically only afforded movie stars. And if there were a god in whose likeness he is modeled, it would have to be Janus, the forward-backward-looking deity of beginnings and transitions. — metropolismag.com

Seniors in the architecture major will have to abandon T-squares and straight edges for their latest project: designing water slides for the Wild Wadi Water Park in Dubai.

The students will enter their designs into a global architecture contest sponsored by the Jumeirah hotel chain, which owns the water park. — yaledailynews.com

"It was a shock to come out [of graduate school] and realize [modern architects] were a public enemy,” Chipperfield said.

This “hostile public opinion,” he said, was the result of poor work by the previous generation of architects, whose bad reputation became projected onto Chipperfield and his contemporaries. Furthermore, the damage to England’s monuments and other edifices caused in World War II contributed to the public’s grim outlook on architecture, he added. — yaledailynews.com

The career of eminent architect and educator Stanley Tigerman is the subject of a retrospective exhibition opening at the Yale School of Architecture Gallery, in historic Paul Rudolph Hall, on August 22, 2011. Ceci n’est pas une rêverie*: The Architecture of Stanley Tigerman, which remains on view through November 5, 2011... — artdaily.org

Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo met in the Saarinen office, where Roche was Saarinen's indispensible lead designer and Dinkeloo directed the firm's production. Upon Saarinen's sudden death in 1961 the pair assumed control of the firm, completing a series of highly significant projects then in construction or on the boards (including Dulles Airport, the CBS Building, Bell Labs and the St. Louis Arch) after which, in 1966, they seamlessly transitioned into their own independent practice. — places.designobserver.com