Celebrating Yale's first new residential colleges in fifty years, The
New Residential Colleges at Yale examines the role of the residential
college system and the evolution of Yale's urban campus, presenting an
important new chapter in the history of Yale and New Haven.
The residential college system at Yale, modeled after the academic
communities at Oxford and Cambridge, is a cornerstone of Yale
undergraduate life, breaking down the larger university into smaller,
more closely-knit communities. Eight of the original ten residential
colleges at Yale were designed by James Gamble Rogers in the 1930s,
establishing Collegiate Gothic as the style with which Yale is most
closely identified today.
For the two new colleges, Robert A.M. Stern Architects was charged with
designing buildings that fit into the residential college system, and in
so doing say "Yale," while bringing twenty-first-century standards of
communal living and environmental responsibility to college residential
life. The two new colleges, housing 450 students each, are conceived as
fraternal twins, similar in size but each enjoying its own identity,
each incorporating a dining hall, a library, and a house for the head of
the college, and each maintaining the traditional organization of
entryways that intentionally create more intimate communities of
students within the larger whole.
The site will play important role in redefining the overall sense of the
Yale campus, serving as it does as a lynchpin between districts
identified with the humanities and the sciences, and between the
university and adjacent neighborhoods. Beyond questions of Yale and New
Haven, the book contributes to a wider historical and theoretical
conversation about the expression of place, time, and identity through
architecture.
The design of the new colleges exemplifies the challenges and
opportunities involved with practicing traditional architecture as a
meditation between past and present in a historically sensitive setting.
An extensive archive of original drawings, models, material samples, as
well as extensive color photography of the completed buildings,
illustrates the story.
