School Notes: School of Architecture
November/December 2023

Building for the environment

The Yale Center for Ecosystems in Architecture, working with the United Nations Environment Programme and Global ABC, has released the report “Building Materials and the Climate: Constructing a New Future.” The document offers recommendations and guidelines for avoiding waste, shifting to sustainably produced materials, and improving decarbonization of conventional materials. Construction accounts for 37 percent of global emissions; even simple interventions in construction industries can make an outsized impact.

New faculty

The School of Architecture welcomes three new faculty members. Assistant professor David Sadighian ’07, ’10MEnvD, completed his PhD at Harvard University. He specializes in the history of architecture, infrastructure, and material culture in the Atlantic World since the eighteenth century. His work situates the history of design at the nexus of empire, migration, capitalism, and political thought, bridging the disciplines of art and architectural history with global history, sociology, and related fields. Ife Vanable, who has held positions as KPF Visiting Scholar and Presidential Visiting Fellow, will join the faculty as an assistant professor. Ana María Durán Calisto will begin a new appointment as Daniel Rose (1951) Visiting Assistant Professor.

Adaptive reuse

Dean Deborah Berke has published a new book, written together with architecture critic Thomas de Monchaux, Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science Karen C. Seto, and artist Titus Kaphar of NXTHVN. Transform: Promising Places, Second Chances, and the Architecture of Transformational Change (Monacelli) uses adaptive-reuse projects completed by Dean Berke’s firm TenBerke, including the Yale School of Art, to make the case for using old buildings for new purposes. The book culminates in the manifesto “Against Historic Preservation,” which argues that creatively and visibly repurposed places are also where people feel especially empowered to make new beginnings in their own lives.