Eero Saarinen with a model of Morse and Stiles Colleges, courtesy Yale University Archive

Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future, the first retrospective on the Finnish-born architect, is currently on view in New Haven, Connecticut through May 2. The tour concludes at Yale, where Saarinen studied architecture and designed some of his most significant buildings and where the major archive devoted to his work resides.

Details of our current renovation of Saarinen's Morse and Ezra Stiles College are included in the exhibition. The project includes the restoration and renovation of all existing facilities, the reconfiguration and updating of living quarters, and the addition of a below grade, naturally-lit, 30,000-square-foot common space, all while retaining Saarinen's original design intent. Morse College, named for Samuel F.B. Morse (Yale, 1810), artist, physician, and inventor of the electric telegraph, and its companion, Stiles College, named for Ezra Stiles (Yale, 1746), theologian, lawyer, scientist, philosopher, and Yale president, were conceived as a single design, intended to be both responsive to and distinct from Yale's other residential colleges.

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Brockman Hall is composed of two bars nestled between existing buildings

In the spring of 2008, we began design for Brockman Hall for Physics at Rice University in Houston, Texas. This 110,000 SF facility will house research, teaching, and office space for the Departments of Physics & Astronomy and Electrical & Computer Engineering. Nestled between existing buildings in the dense Science Quad, the building envelope respects the scale of the historic masonry vocabulary of the campus while extending it into a 21st century model for architecture and research at Rice. In this manner, lightness and transparency become the foil to weight and opacity. Further, as is common among other buildings on campus, subtle references to the building's program will be made with iconography incorporated into elements of the building skin.

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Yale School of Art Gallery and Sidwell Friends Middle School
photos © Peter Aaron/Esto (left) and © Halkin Photography LLC (right)

It was announced last month that the Yale University School of Art Gallery and Sidwell Friends Middle School have received 2008 Western Red Cedar Architectural Design Awards, presented by The Western Red Cedar Lumber Association and The Cedar Shake and Shingle Bureau.

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Silliman College inner courtyard

In 2008 we completed Silliman College, our fourth residential college renovation at Yale University. Silliman is the largest of Yale University’s ten original residential Colleges, housing 400 undergraduate students in an immersive residential, academic and social environment. The complex is composed of historic structures from three separate building campaigns begun in the 1890s and extending through 1940.

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UNCC Center City Building, renderings © studio amd

Construction is scheduled to begin this spring for the new 12-story Center City Building for UNC Charlotte. Located at Ninth and Brevard Streets in downtown Charlotte, the new building will house the University's MBA program and other programs including graduate-level classes in the colleges of Engineering, Health and Human Services, Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Arts + Architecture's new master's program in Urban Design. The new building defines UNC as a vibrant addition to the central business district, providing a unique icon for the University while establishing a lively urban presence in the First Ward. Charlotte-based Gantt Huberman Architects, close design collaborators with us in this project, is serving as Architect of Record.

Read the news release

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