Building Review: Many, Many Inches Full of Intention

A Review of the Living Village at Yale Divinity School

The Living Village, Yale’s new dormitory at the Divinity School, opened with a two-day public tour. It is the outcome of a decade-long planning process in alignment with the Living Building Challenge, a certification that evaluates buildings across seven performance areas: Place, Water, Energy, Health + Happiness, Materials, Equity, and Beauty. Constructed with mass timber and high-performance insulation, the project claims to consume less energy than it produces through rooftop solar panels, capture and treat all its own water on-site, and operate partially on passive cooling strategies. In these terms, the building is operationally net positive.

It is also net positive, so to speak, in square footage per person. ¹ While each of its 51 student residents is assigned a 250–400 sq ft room, that area increases to 781 sq ft per person if one includes common areas—which stood largely unused during my weekend visit. The 4.4 acre plot ² additionally features panoramic viewing platforms, panoramic gardens, and panoramic walking paths—photogenic amenities not afforded to the 205 graduate students once housed at the just-demolished Helen Hadley Hall on Temple Street, which had nearly double the density.

True, that older housing, if left standing, would have consumed the equivalent of this new building’s 1,580 metric tons of embodied carbon in just over a decade ³ to house the same number of students. By contrast, the Living Village overproduces electricity by 5%, generating enough surplus to power an entire 1.4 houses ⁴ almost as good as the 1.8 houses worth of CO₂ that could have been captured by simply foresting the whole site. ⁵ Though a forest is a much less effective brand ambassador, unable to boast study centers plus an activity center, student lounges plus a “lantern lounge,” shared kitchenettes plus a community kitchen.

The Living Village succeeds in numbers but perhaps not in vision. Environmental stewardship cannot be reduced to exceeding baselines. It demands that we totally rethink the very foundation of our existence as a society. After 150 years of carbon modernity defined by the pursuit of comfort, speed, and scale through the instant combustion of fossilized energy—we are still expanding, optimizing and consuming. Cleaner tools, smarter systems, sustainable language, sure, but the logic remains unchanged: More systems. More space. More complexity. Each new efficiency promises salvation, but only entrenches the very patterns we claim to want to leave behind. The question is not whether buildings can do more. The question is whether we can imagine needing less.