Potemkin college

Christopher Gardner

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If this peculiar structure looks to you like an escaped piece of a Yale residential college, you’re actually not that far off. Erected in early 2012 on a vacant lot near Science Park, it is a mockup of several possible window, masonry, and roof treatments for the two new colleges that are now under construction. School of Architecture dean Robert A. M. Stern ’65MArch, whose firm designed the colleges, says such mockups are common in large-scale projects; he hopes to keep it in place during construction to show contractors how the work should be done. After that? “Maybe the university will auction it off for someone’s backyard,” Stern jokes.