Maps in the Making

Starting over is strange. Though this isn’t really starting over, it is more like finding our way back.
Some of us arrived at Yale fresh from school, others from years of practice, dusting off our
academic bearings. I graduated three years ago from the University of Oregon; long enough to
feel nostalgic about late nights in studio. Returning to academia feels like waking up in a familiar room after moving out long ago. The furniture rearranged, a new space, but still home.

The first weeks of the M.Arch II Resources for Design Research were a blur of names and faces that will soon be indelible. We ask each other where we live in New Haven, nodding despite having no idea where it is. A street corner that is just a word to me now will become a landmark in someone else’s story. There’s a kind of irony to it: trying to map each other, and ourselves, in real time.
Our sense of community grows in pieces. Some of us have come from Oregon, California, North Carolina, Arizona, New York, others from Kenya, Korea, China, Canada, Brazil, India, Egypt. We are united by disorientation. The small humiliation of getting lost in Rudolph Hall, of asking what seems like an obvious question. Yet that too feels like part of the education. We’re not just learning the resources of Yale through this summer program, the woodshop, the libraries, the technological resources, but the architecture of the campus itself and the stories etched into buildings that have been held generations before us.
This summer the program asked us to ground ourselves by studying the place we now inhabit. Each of us picked a built space on or around campus to research and then used the archives, libraries and resources that the school offers to create collages and installation objects. The work varied. Some of us studied the ecosystems around Kroon Hall and the history of elm diseases while others mapped the port and documented the goods moving in and out of New Haven. Some imagined a re-envisioned Yale: What if the Beinecke Library were more accessible and open? What if we could see the layered histories of spaces like Silliman College or Rudolph Hall? Others explored how buildings on campus evoke memories of our homes or other beloved places. We created kaleidoscopes, maps, models, and board games. Through this work we traced the layered history of Yale’s architecture and in doing so, began to piece together something larger: an introduction not only to the campus but to New Haven itself.
We’re starting to find our bearings. A New semester, a new city, and a new collection of names that will soon become a kind of family. A little lost, but already certain that none of it will stay unfamiliar for long.