Author Archives: Natasha Thondavadi

When students returned to campus this August, they were greeted once again by the sight of Payne Whitney Gymnasium shrouded in blue scaffolding. The University began renovations on Payne Whitney’s exterior in 2007, suspending the project in 2008 due to budget cuts in capital maintenance projects following the recession, said Stephen Brown, the director of »

On Monday, the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, awarded School of Architecture professor Deborah Berke with the first-ever Berkeley-Rupp Architecture Professorship and Prize. The jury for the $100,000 prize selected Berke for her commitment to the advancement of women in architecture, as well as her focus on sustainability. Berke, the »

With the start of the Venice Biennale international architecture festival, Yale student work is on view in a prominent global forum. The Venice Biennale, which the city of Venice introduced in 1896 to serve as a global symposium for the arts, has served as either an art or an architecture festival in alternating years since »

After a semester of rehearsal, the Yale Dance Theater program will bring the choreography of the late dance legend Merce Cunningham to the stage in the first performance of Cunningham’s work since his company dissolved in January 2012. In two performances on Friday, Yale Dance Theater aims to explore the future of Cunningham’s legacy d, »

Three years ago, administrators at the School of Architecture turned back to the drawing board. Students and professors had raised concerns about the undergraduate architecture major’s sequence of courses, said Bimal Mendis ’98 ARC ’02, the major’s current director of undergraduate studies and an assistant dean at the Architecture School. This May marks the graduation »

Former Yale professor and experimental filmmaker Standish Lawder GRD ’67 returned to campus Wednesday to receive the Film Studies Program’s annual award for a talented member of the field. Over the course of the day, the Film Studies Program held several events at the Whitney Humanities Center to honor Lawder, who was one of the »

A recently established lecture series at the School of Architecture aims to rejuvenate the school’s joint degree program with the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. The series, which will feature conversations between professors from the two schools with overlapping research interests, is meant to facilitate interaction between students and faculty from the two disciplines, »

From Feb. 9 to 11, more than 500 architects, professors and critics from across the globe descended on New Haven to debate the place of hand drawing in contemporary architecture. Meant to fill Hastings Hall to capacity, the symposium — “Is Drawing Dead?” — was so popular that attendees were relocated to overflow rooms elsewhere »

Architectural plans for Yale’s two new residential colleges were completed last week, but University administrators said construction cannot start without fundraising toward the $313 million outstanding for the project. The completed set of construction documents for Yale’s 13th and 14th residential colleges was issued by Robert A. M. Stern Architects last Friday, University Planner Laura »

Over the past two weeks, several events at the School of Architecture have highlighted a growing focus on sustainable parks. On Thursday, a talk entitled “New York City’s Sustainable Parks for the 21st Century” brought Adrian Benepe, the New York City Parks and Recreation Department commissioner, to New Haven to discuss the intersection between public »

With the completion of the Ordos Museum in fall 2011, Chinese architect Yansong Ma ARC ’02 and his team at the Beijing-based architecture firm MAD have transformed the architectural landscape of Inner Mongolia. The News spoke to Ma about his architectural career and this six-year-long project in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert. Q When did you know »

On Wednesday, March 14, members of Occupy New Haven waited anxiously for the New Haven Police Department to march onto the Green and forcibly remove their encampment, the last of its kind in New England. But as the clock struck noon, the deadline set by City Hall for tents to be off the Green, the »