Preservationists object to plan for new colleges

Buildings to be demolished, clockwise from top left: Daniel Cady Eaton house, Hammond hall, Seeley Mudd Library, 88 Prospect Street.

“I find it very shocking that the total demolition of a giant site like this is still thought of as the way to proceed,” says Anstress Farwell ’78MA, president of the New Haven Urban Design League.

More seriously, she questions the wisdom of emulating the neo-Gothic architecture of Yale’s central campus. Calling it “a fantasy environment about what Yale has been in the past,” Farwell says, “I don’t think that if the university succeeds in this plan, the debate will ever go away: why did Yale do something retardataire at a moment when architecture is looking to be innovative?”

Preservationists object to plan for new colleges Carol Bass Yale Alumni Magazine 7/7/09

-Chris

Kevin Roche at NH Preservation Trust, May 12th

Via the Arts Council of Greater New Haven:

12 Tuesday
The Value of Preserving the Past. Presentation by Kevin Roche, FAIA, principal in the firm of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo & Associates, LLC. New Haven Preservation Trust Annual Meeting and Silent Auction of collectibles/historical items. Reception to follow Mr. Roche’s talk. 5-7:30 pm. Free and open to the public. First Presbyterian Church, 704 Whitney Ave., New Haven. (203) 562-5919. www.nhpt.org.

-Chris

World Digital Library now online

The World Digital Library, a free, multilingual collection of primary materials from around the world, of which Yale is a primary contributor, was launched yesterday.

The World Digital Library, which was officially inaugurated Tuesday at the Paris headquarters of UNESCO, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, has started small, with about 1,200 documents and their explanations from scholars in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian. But it is designed to accommodate an unlimited number of such texts, charts and illustrations from as many countries and libraries as want to contribute.

World Digital Library putting human history a click away Edward Cody Chicago Tribune 4/22/09

More from the YDN here.

-Chris

Saving the Barns, Before They Vanish

Wendy Carlson for The New York Times

European architects of the early 20th century became enamored with the spare construction of American barns, said Sandy Isenstadt, a professor of modern architecture at Yale. “To them, barns and silos represented exactly the sort of strict functional thinking, without concern for aesthetics, that a new architecture might be founded upon,” he said. “So they saw such buildings as beautiful — a beauty that descends from attention to function rather than from concern for appearance.”

Saving the Barns, Before They Vanish Wendy Carlson NYT 3/6/09

Posted by Chris