Oh, good -- brick, muntins, and crystal as far as the eye can see ?

Sorry -- I'm in a bitter mood this evening. . .

$600 million for a dorm???

This is a joke, everything wrong with Yale and Architecture is signified by this expansion.

We can only hope the thing isn't named for G W Bush.

Im not surprised - did anyone catch the cnn article last year on the ivies and their endowments? The top 5 universities combined for a cash value of their endowments of over $100 billion. Yes thats right - $100 billion

And they dont pay taxes either.

[url=http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/05/14/beck.collegeendowment/index.html
link[/url]

and Harvard, the wealthiest educational institution in the world, does not allow the public to use its libraries! I feel like it's pretty standard practice to open your libraries to the public at least during certian hours, and I especially feel like Harvard has a special obligation to the public given its stature.

should've hired him to do the art history building (addition to the architecture school). would've done a better job than gwathmey...

really FLM?

i feel like i used to get into the architecture library without questions asked...

flm ... have you seen the sort of scum that floats around Harvard Square?

oh yeah ... that'd be the students, wouldn't it?

well ... if they let everybody use their library, then what would be the point of exclusivity?

UW has the same policy.

isn't stern the dean of the yale SOA? isn't that a huge conflict of interest?

at UVA, they had to jump through some serious loopholes so that eg clark could to the arch. extension

flw....flash your better side to the student our underpaid employee and you bottom side be in the library in a match stick flash. I recall wondering all thru Serts Science Building.

what on earth are they going to spend $600 million on?? princeton's whitman college, which has about half as many beds as the new yale colleges, only cost about $160 million. and for that they got the most gaudy authentic historicist puke fest there is to get.

Comparing a Yale Residential College to a college at Princeton is like comparing a luxury resort to a Motel 6. Princeton attempted to copy Yale's 100-year old system of quads and colleges in the 1980s, but failed miserably.

i suspect that stern is qualified for the task at hand. top architecture is truly priceless, although in this instance $600 million will have to do. i applaud yale for having the courage to invest so wisely in the well-being of its students. sadly, i'll never get to use those dorms myself.

annonyc, you say that as if it's a bad thing. both yale's and princeton's systems have their advantages and disadvantages. both end up being equally great and equally problematic, albeit in different ways.

The residential college system at yale is not 100 years old. Also, many of the buildings were built in the 20s and 30s.

Yup. Plus, residential colleges are not just dorms, each one's a mini campus with classrooms, lecture halls, labs, dining halls, even faculty offices and gym facilities. And they're doing two of them for the $600 mil. Still sounds like a lot.

i'll throw this out as a contrary challenge:

name me 3 other architects, doing more contemporary work, who you would trust to build a 200 year residential college, who could work within the already established context at yale, and whose work wouldn't look as dated as the saarinen pieces there do (in a scant 40+ years).

i'm not sure who i'd put on that list - maybe chipperfield (and a heavily qualified maybe)? maybe o'donell tuomey? no way you put any of the 'zippy' crowd...

gehry, hadid, and dick busch architects

that's a fair point, laru

Who can say what will look "dated" in another 40 years ? And why wouldn't something that looks dated now, take on a different luster as tastes and preferences swing yet again ?

Perhaps only a "tested" formula -- Classicism ? the Pyramids ? -- has a hope of better-than-average acceptance, over time. . .?

I wrote a small piece on Porphyrios' Whitman Residential College at Princeton a couple of months ago. Similar issues. Similar criticism.

RAMSA + Yale = Match made in heaven

Surely this comes as no surprise...Stern is nearing the end of his YSOA dean-ship...this commission has "legacy" written all over it.

sdr -

fair point. if you're yale, though, would you take a 600M risk on someone likely to produce a, perhaps, more 'challenging' kind of project (say zaha) which has a very high probability of looking so dated it will hurt or do you choose to develop an architecture that you know will look more conservative or (gasp) traditional, with the understanding it will blend in more with what you already have and will form a more harmonious ensemble.

look, i'm not defending stern - i think there are more talented architects practicing in a traditional vocabulary (scott merrill for example, if not leon krier). hell, even thinking about it some more, renzo piano could have been a decent pick.

reality is, not many firms who understand yale, have done 500M+ projects, and could really deliver a project built to last even 100+ years (and age well) even exist. the short list would have been very short indeed.

let's hope bob sees this as THE project of his career and gets the a+ team in the office on the case...

Who the hell said Bob Stern projects age that well?

Architectural Styles of Contemporary Universities:

(click image to see larger version)

nice

alexander - i like #2 and 3 the best

of course I did go to ASU... haha

i love the all seeing eye of saron in the gothic...hehe