On The Ground

Surprisingly Unsurprising
Tony Salem Musleh (M.Arch I ’26)

If the sun were to end, and darkness sought to occupy our towns and villages, Rudolph’s fourth would still run as if the sun still shone. Lucas would draw his worm’s-eye views, Yanbo would distribute his flyers, and Tara would tell her jokes.

By the third year, we all know our little concrete castle as if it were our childhood home. And though it is always good to come home, time is telling us to seek new horizons.

On Site
Majdi Alkarute (M.Arch I ’27)

Second year students toured the Mitchell Library near Edgewood Park, the site of our Core 2 studio. The library was designed in the ’60s by a colleague of Paul Rudolph, Gilbert Switzer, with a signature feature of the era—stairs everywhere.

Students measured using their bodies, took photos, made cyanotypes of the plantings, and more as they began to think about what to save and what to transform. The following day, the 6on7 torch was successfully passed on to the first years, who called in the big guns (i.e. Mr. Will) to start the year off in style.

Some Serious Speculating
Maggie Holm (M.Arch I ’28)

First years survived their first week and are already engaged in highly consequential discourse concerning the role of the architecture school today.Pertinent questions include:

Is a 9 am Structures class full of sleep-deprived architecture students a liability? How effectively is my plan diagram describing Ladybird’s troubled relationship with her mother? Is it chic or showy to tag @yalearchitecture in your Instagram bio? Can we go to Gryphon’s every single night this week? Answers to these pressing questions might be buried under 500 unread WhatsApp texts!

Seventh Floor Honeymoon
Marusya Bakhrameeva (M.Arch II ’26)

We rolled up our sleeves, embraced our new marital status with the seventh floor, and began to cultivate the space as our own. Based on our shared wishes, Yasmin sketched a vision for how it might look.

Alongside a new home, we also received a new schedule. The final review, spread across spaces of the Paul Rudolph Building, will now take place after the spring recess. In the meantime, we are drafting individual syllabuses to fit a shorter timeline. An atmosphere of support and knowledge-sharing finally thrives here, a spirit that could have evaporated on the fourth floor.

New Year, New Geographies
Layna Chen (M.E.D)

The M.E.D cohort has been settling in these past few weeks. We welcome new students Zoe, Vinh, and Alp as we expand our research distributions to the new geographies in Europe, other parts of Southeast Asia, and Central Asia.

Our first weeks have been filled with the preliminary rounds of formal meetings, informal meetings, drinks, tours, class schedules, and roundtable coordination. We await our first roundtable, September 22, to discuss field research results (second years) and initial developments (first years).

Launchings
Jaime Solares Carmona (Ph.D)

We welcome our new colleagues Anas Alkhatib, Benjamin Akhavan, Jingyi Xu and Yuxiang Chen. We hope you find and help build a collaborative, stimulating, and productive environment to pursue your Ph.D!

We also have other exciting news: Izzy Kornblatt (Ph.D ’28) is launching his new book Encounters: Denise Scott Brown Photographs by Lars Müller Publishers. There will be a panel discussion with Lars Müller, Joan Ockman, Bill Whitaker and the author on September 15 at 6:30 pm at UPenn School of Design, and another the following day with Beatriz Colomina, Andrés Jaque, and Lars Müller at 6:00 pm at the Center for Architecture.

Hope on the Horizons
Tian Hsu (Undergraduate)

When it seemed all hope was lost for the seniors—33% of our already-small cohort had abandoned the Architecture major, and one TF had been severed by the registration hounds—a soldier rose from the dead. Shoutout Declan Finn: welcome back to the major!

Meanwhile, broken bottles, found sticks, discarded earbuds, etc… flow over the desks of the juniors. Serial litterers? No, just models of aggregation, and the beginnings of architectural genius.

8/28
DEAN DEBORAH BERKE kicks off the semester with a warm but measured welcome to Advanced Studio lottery, acknowledging the fraughtness of international borders and reductions to travel budgets.

8/28
Between MICHAEL YOUNG’s Stereo4 (“stereo-” as in “solid”), AMIN TAHA’s pre-tensioned stone beams, and MARLON BLACKWELL’s search for the “thick, slow, and implicit,” it’s definitely bulking season at YSoA.

8/28
JEANNE GANG delivers the semester’s first public lecture to a full house, “grafting” herself into Yale by donning an aptly paprika-colored coat.

8/29
The year’s first 6on7 fills Rudolph Hall’s roof terrace with joyful reunions, boozy introductions, and beats by YIRU WU (aka R:00) and MEIXI XU.

9/4
“If you do something you are not supposed to do—you become happy!” – TAKAHARU & YUI TEZUKA

9/4
MARIA G CAMASMIE, LAYNA CHEN, ALEX KIM, and JIAQI WANG open the World Game Cafe in the North Gallery, showcasing 200 years of game design while also offering students a place in the building to simply hang out and have a coffee—a comfort absent for just as long.

9/5
MELOS SHTALOJA, MOSS BRENNER-BRYANT, YANBO LI, MARIA G CAMASMIE, and History Ph.D ANDREA HO introduce the incoming class to the Local 33 graduate student union, after having been quietly bumped out of the previous week’s official orientation schedule.

9/9
Having overcome the byzantine machinery of US customs control, AYUSHA ARIANA, ISKANDER GUETTA, RIZEK BAHBAH, and TAESHA AURORA launch Retrospecta 48 with graphic designers AMY FANG and XIWEN ZHANG.