I.S College Art News: Yale University Architecture Students Design Hub For International Festival

In the tradition of the First-Year Building Project at Yale School of Architecture, students in the school’s post-professional master’s program have designed and constructed an information center for the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.

The two-color aluminum pavilion, which can appear as a sinuating lattice configuration or as a solid curvy mass depending on the viewer’s vantage point, will be unveiled at a ribbon-cutting ceremony on the New Haven Green on Friday, June 15, at 4:30 p.m.

The 300-square-foot pavilion will serve as the hub of the festival, which this year officially opens on Saturday, June 16, and continues through Saturday, June 30. It will be located on the Church Street side of the Lower Green, south of Elm Street, and the structure can easily be disassembled, stored and reassembled each year.

The pavilion is the result of a three-month course in the Master’s of Architecture II program, designed for students who already have professional experience in the field, many as licensed practitioners.

Brennan Buck, faculty adviser for the course, described the project in a blog he and participating student David Bench write for Metropolis magazine:

“The Yale ‘Assembly’ Pavilion is the younger, smaller, more carefree sister to Yale’s Building Project — the 40-year-old tradition in which first-year students design and build a house. … It is a chance to work at full scale with real architectural materials, marshal the organizational effort needed to realize a complex building, work with clients and consultants, engage with legal and public processes, and create a structure to be inhabited and experienced by thousands of people each year.

“The students have created an engaging heart for the Festival made from over 1,000 aluminum panels, which create shifting effects of reflection and color as visitors move around it. … Solid and massive from one angle, lightweight and almost entirely porous from another, it alternately hides and reveals its contents.”

In addition to Bench, the festival pavilion was designed and built by Yale School of Architecture students John Taylor Bachman, Rob Bundy, Raven Hardison, Zac Heaps, Matt Hettler, Jacqueline Ho, Nicholas Hunt, Seema Kairam, John Lacy, Amy Mielke,Veer Nanavatty, and Eric Zahn.

Support for the project was provided by the international company Assa Abloy.