School Notes: School of Architecture
September/October 2024

Urban Design Workshop

This fall the Yale Urban Design Workshop (YUDW) is celebrating the 30th anniversary of engagement with the Dwight neighborhood in New Haven, a collaboration that resulted in the 1996 Neighborhood Plan for Community Action. The plan crystalized a community-organizing process, helping Dwight residents to identify goals and project proposals, build neighborhood consensus, and clarify community concerns and priorities. It made it possible for the community to mobilize and to successfully apply for grant funding while communicating neighborhood concerns to politicians. With the design assistance of the YUDW, over 30 years, the neighborhood rehabilitated houses, built a new grocery, expanded pre-K education, and built a meeting space and gymnasium. The workshop’s work with the Dwight neighborhood is ongoing, with recent projects including air-quality monitoring, investigations into mitigating urban heat and associated health impacts, affordable housing, and additional pre-K classrooms.

Soil Sisters

This summer, students in the Soil Sisters course taught by assistant professor Mae-ling Lokko traveled to Senegal to engage with actors at various stages of material production across the earthen masonry, agriculture, forestry, and textile sectors, inviting students to identify gaps between them that result in waste, toxicity, and value loss, and transform them into design opportunities. Pedagogically, the program is designed through embodied and participatory educational experiences that drive learning through making, designing through making together, and evaluating designs through public engagement. Over four weeks the students find themselves in a variety of landscapes connected to building-material cycles—on riverbanks harvesting invasive species, at a research institute fabricating earth blocks, on salt beds harvesting salt, and dyeing fabrics in a textile facility. 

Soil Sisters, a research area at the School of Architecture’s Center for Ecosystems in Architecture, was conceived of to go beyond merely treating the symptoms of toxic building-material practices to drive more impactful material paradigms that make ecological health the ultimate goal of material life-cycle design. Other School of Architecture summer programs include the Robert A. M. Stern Rome Seminar and programs in London, Mexico City, and Civita di Bagnoregio.