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Yale Under Construction
In the last ten years, nearly every corner of the campus has been cordoned off, torn up, and put back together in a $2 billion program of renovations and new buildings. And there’s more on the way.
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
January/February 2006

Click here for a tour of newly built or renovated buildings at Yale—plus some still on the drawing board.

After a long period in which little was built at Yale, the university is at it again. In the last ten years, some 47 buildings have been renovated, and 16 new buildings completed; 7 more new buildings and 15 renovations are in the works. The building effort—which has cost about $2 billion so far—has affected nearly every component school and every geographic corner of the university.

The physical Yale has been reinvented at least twice before. The first time, the college’s original Brick Row was replaced by a collection of exuberant Victorian buildings, many of which were themselves torn down between the world wars to accommodate the collegiate Gothic buildings that most people associate with Yale today. The construction boom of the 1950s and '60s did not change the campus as radically, but as School of Architecture dean Robert A. M. Stern '65MArch puts it, it “peppered the stew” with highly individual projects like the Beinecke Library, Ingalls Rink, and the Art & Architecture Building—works that earned Yale a reputation as a patron of progressive architecture.

The mark of the current building campaign is more subtle. Yale has devoted an extraordinary amount of time and effort to renovating and restoring the great buildings of the 1920s and '30s. Alumni returning to campus have noticed that the existing buildings are cleaner outside and more resplendent within. Much of the expense, though, went into major structural and systems improvements hidden behind the faux Oxonian walls. Who can tell, for example, that the entire stone façade of Sterling Memorial Library was taken down and then put back in an effort to stop moisture infiltration?

More recently, the university has started erecting new buildings again. Science Hill has four new laboratory buildings, with two more in design. The School of Medicine has built an enormous new lab building of its own, the Anlyan Center. A new police headquarters and health services center will anchor Yale’s efforts to develop the area north of the Grove Street Cemetery. And the “arts area,” centered on Chapel and York streets, is in the midst of a large renovation and construction campaign that will yield at least four new buildings.

The new work is neither as stylistically consistent as those of the interwar years nor as individualistic as those of the 1950s and '60s. In some cases—like the Class of 1954 Chemistry Research Building—they echo the older buildings around them in form and materials. Others are bolder, but still keenly attuned to their urban sites: Cesar Pelli’s Malone Engineering Center is largely defined by an unmistakably modern curved glass wall, but on Prospect Street it has a more traditional stone façade that lines up with those of its neighbors. This attention to context is no accident: whatever gets built at Yale these days must pass under the eyes of an informal committee consisting of Stern and his predecessors Pelli and Thomas Beeby (they call themselves the “three amigos”), all of whom have a history of prizing urban good manners over individual expression in their own work. Yale has not demonstrated the hunger for a “signature building” that many universities have shown in recent years—tapping stars like Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid to produce postcard architecture for their campuses.

But Yale may yet produce another building on a par with its best modern works. The Environment School’s new Kroon Building is expected to be an important embodiment of environmentally conscious architecture. The School of Drama is soon expected to build a new theater, which could be a rich source of inspiration for an innovative architect. And the School of Management may build an entire new home on a large Whitney Avenue site—an opportunity to reinterpret the classic Yale quadrangle for the twenty-first century.

But for now, there are plenty of new things to see if you can make it back to campus.

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