On The Ground

Above us is only the sky
Tony Salem Musleh
M.Arch I ’26

Leaves are full of life in August. Travel was just a coffee break. September’s wind whispers summer’s end. By its end, tables are cleaned, books stored, coffee cups stacked.

The fourth is ours.
We are third-years.

We share all of Zund’s mysteries, blacklist classes, and make the disco ball spin.
By the end of September, we are comfortable in the role of “Third-Year M.Arch I.”
And while we miss our seniors, we can proudly say:
our DJs are surpassing.
Thanks, RuRu.

The Mitchell Library is “Mid”
Majdi Alkarute
M.Arch I ’27

“By itself it’s mid—with me, it’s going to be a superstar.” That’s how Nathan Nguyen described Mitchell Library, the subject of our adaptive reuse studio. “I think that’s fair,” Robbie Skoronski agreed about the building’s mid-ness. So how to reuse something with apparently limited architectural value in the idealized world of design studios? Some students think that it would be an affront to demolish the building beyond recognition. Sure, the value of the building is subjective, but “I haven’t seen anyone do better,” joked Melos Shtaloja. But others think it’s better to demolish an existing building than ruin a new one.

Perfection is a Collectable
Maggie Holm
M.Arch I ’28

“One could say the matcha-dubai-chocolate-labubu is our generation’s Vitruvian Man” – David Sadighian, Architecture and Modernity

While it’s widely recognized that Da Vinci’s perfect man is dead, first-years proposed what he’s been reincarnated as. Grayson Sommer says it’s the default scale figure at 0,0 in SketchUp. Vicky Wu thinks he has a Rhino Dynamic Input Box hovering over his head. Others claim that our cohort’s ideal is Professor Moon. Bader Baroudy says that while the Vitruvian Man has never been all-representative, the labubu exquisite corpse is perhaps the perfect symbol of empty aspirations under late-stage capitalism.

Leaving the Nest
Marusya Bakhrameeva
M.Arch II ’26

The seventh floor is gradually becoming a cozy nest of our own design. Wooden shelves now rest warmly against the concrete walls, and a collectively chosen couch is on its way. Knowing that Rudolph Hall will welcome us home, we can focus on our theses. Each of us created an “advanced studio trip” for ourselves; the itineraries reflect the individuality of the research they support. The journeys span across the year and the globe. From now until the spring midterm, we will explore every continent except Australia and Antarctica, carrying the quiet assurance that our shared space awaits us.

Perspective Needs a Visa
Shreshtha Goyal
M.Arch II ’27

Over half of our cohort are international students. The M.Arch II program’s curriculum for travel week and thesis research gives opportunities that let us step directly into the contexts we design for. Perspective is essential to design, but perspective needs access, and access requires a visa, which, for us, comes at a cost. Alongside classes and jobs, many of us spent hours chasing visa appointments, navigating the city without passports, and waiting anxiously for their return. Thankfully, they arrived in time, but each trip carries uncertainty. Hopefully, we will see you back at school!

Group Checkpoints
Layna Chen
M.E.D

The M.E.D class just had their first of three roundtable meetings this semester. Formatted like a group discussion, it was a day for each of us to share updates on our projects. (There was a great deal of work ahead for us all, leaving little time to craft a collective “On the Ground” group update.)

For first-years, “what is your thesis?” still remains a stressful topic.

Questions of “What’s next?” loom larger for second-years as they face decisions regarding Ph.D applications, symposium and journal entries, and futures after the M.E.D program.

Learning to Teach
Jaime Solares Carmona
Ph.D

I’ll allow myself to share some personal news: I’ve started TFing for the class “Architecture and Modernity.” I am very excited just for the fact that I’m going to be part of a class that revolves around theory, rather than history. I never had anything like that in Brazil. I also love the idea of keeping my “ears to the ground.” As I am deeply opposed to an academia disconnected from the absurdity of everyday life, I am finding teaching to be a delightful place where I can get closer to the anxieties and potentials of the present moment.

Pin-Up Milestones
Tian Hsu
Undergraduate

Congrats to the juniors on surviving printer jams and costly prints, now fluent in 0.1 vs 1 lineweight. Meanwhile, seniors have advanced from “dominant void” to “intimate immensity”—though what that means, we’re still waiting to hear.

9/8
Commissioner TARA VASANTH kicks off the Fall 2025 Rudolph Open. Team names range from classically punny (Bad at Minton) to cheekily obscure (3,3,3,3,2) to painfully architectural (Net Zero).

9/10
Our friends at Princeton receive news that, effective immediately, M.Arch II students will join their M.Arch I classmates in having tuition and healthcare fully funded.

9/14
The YIMBYtown conference convenes at the Omni Hotel, with housing advocates, developers, municipal bureaucrats, and at least one Republican governor joining forces to tackle the housing crisis and consume complimentary Pepe’s.

9/15
After invading the shop and stealing all of YSoA’s clamps, the seniors DOMINATE the VOIDs yet again.

9/19
Trump declares a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas, making it very difficult for international YSoA grads to work at a U.S. firm beyond the three-year Optional Practical Training (OPT) period.

9/25
“The traces of drawing by hand draw a map in the building itself.” – Jean Pierre Crousse

10/3
This year’s Building Project by M.Arch I ’27: a jewel box of wood, corten, a little concrete, and a lot of stairs.

10/6
The much-anticipated, much-toured Living Village student housing, designed by Höweler + Yoon and featuring a fountain by COLE QUIST, ELLEN ZHU, and JULIA EDWARDS, opens at the Divinity School.

Section Title: Lecture Responses

Looking Behind the Curtain
Review of Lake Verea’s “Paparazza Moderna: Lovers & Frenemies”
Cai Sheng-yu (O-Sheng)

Lake Verea, the artistic and romantic duo of Francisca Rivero-Lake and Carla Verea, maintains a guerilla photographic practice. Fascinated by the complex relationships behind canonical modern houses, they photograph reticent buildings without notifying current owners. As paparazza—the rare feminine conjugation of everyone’s love-to-hate-em media pests—they approach with a sort of impish glee. The resulting photographs are thus full of risk and spontaneity, offering a refreshing counterargument to the glossy, straightened images favored by architectural tastemakers.

While the products are visually muted, Lake Verea’s image-making process is nothing but vocal. Their cameras oscillate between distant exteriors and intimate close-ups, challenging the single-family house as the locus for heteronormative ideals. Those genuine stakes come fully into view when they speak. In Rudolph’s austere temple to modernity—and dressed in twinning all-black incognito paparazza outfits, the duo delivered a voyeuristic take on loving and losing in sexy, rectilinear rooms. Their quasi-comedic performativity was precisely the tonal upset that made the canon human-scaled and close to life. It almost feels unfulfilled to consume their work upstairs in the gallery without the live narration. Anecdotes of love and hate are betrayed by the absence of human figures in the photographs themselves.

If the exhibition maps friendships, rivalries, and client-architect feuds, the accompanying lecture-performance zeroes in on perhaps the strongest emotion of all: love. It’s a reminder that modernism did not arise outside fragile human conditions. Pulling back the curtain of tectonics, Lake Verea lets us witness the messy, funny, tragic people that make life and love in buildings, and sometimes for buildings.

Paparazza Moderna: Lovers & Frenemies is on view through November 29.

Ephemerality as Foundation
Response to Barclay & Crousse’s “Permanence and Instability”
Shreshtha Goyal & Marusya Bakhrameeva

Returning to Lima after two decades of practice in Paris, Sandra Barclay and Jean Pierre Crousse embraced the uncertainty of their new context. Memory was what drew them back to Peru: as a robust counterweight to instability, it urges them to tell the story of the land and its people. Not only do Barclay & Crousse’s projects reflect memories of the past, they also invite new memories to take root—as in the UDEP lecture building, where a tree planting initiative allows students to form bonds with the place.

Memory is also anchored in their building methods. Glass bottles set into walls, hand-placed mosaic walkways, and carefully stacked stone give buildings a character that can only emerge from close collaboration with seasoned workers rooted in local traditions.

However, this kind of work also comes with costs, like energy, time, labor, and informal working conditions. Such costs are felt throughout the project, and most deeply by the communities working on site. It’s hard not to think of the builders working day in, day out with salt-resistant reddish pozzolan cement on the exposed concrete, bare-handed in the desert sun when looking at the beautiful plaster wall of the Paracas Museum. Hand-applied cement finishing is no easy task, and the mixing requires precision and a steady hand. The traces of their steady hands are what make the building truly unique. Without them, there would be no building. While informality benefits the project, does it benefit the builders?

Section Title: News Stories

Abundance Without Architects
Greg Calleja Ayapantecatl & Brigid Elrod

In typical conference fashion—breakfast burritos, coffee, orange juice, and roundtables—YIMBYtown 2025 (YIMBY in “yes-in-my-backyard”) drew housing advocates from around the country, state and congressional lawmakers, and grassroots New Haven groups to the Omni Hotel. (Shout-out to Local 217!) As members of the Yale chapter of The Architecture Lobby, we went to see what architecture students might learn from the YIMBY movement for pro-housing policy and zoning reform. But something was missing: where were all the architects?

The energetic tinkerers at YIMBYtown were intent on perfecting the combination of tax credits, code reform, zoning, and deregulation that would unleash a new boom of housing abundance. A room of over two hundred people discussed the latest single-stair code reform, while other attendees expounded on how to rationalize the complicated Oregon vent pipe code—which, according to the Director of Plumbing Standards Research and Development at the non-profit Center for Building in North America, has made new-build plumbing too intricate and expensive since the early 20th Century—and how to streamline building code reform procedures.

But we were still reeling from a moment during the previous panel, “If You Legalize It Will They Build It? Real Estate 101.” City planner-turned-developer Seth Zeren was asked about when developer costs will come down low enough that starting rents will follow. Zeren’s answer was quite clear: any savings in building costs will always go to developer profits, not to lower rent.

So why is the so-called housing abundance movement so focused on speculative developers? What role can architects play in breaking these rules of the game and envisioning a new future for de-commodified housing?

YIMBYtown taught us that reforming building codes is less of a hassle than we thought. Codes are revisioned on three year cycles, and architects can be vocal proponents for those changes. Our professional practice class neither covers that, nor recognizes the potential for architects to use our expertise as a lever for policy changes.

With that, we encourage current and future architecture students to join these conversations and create space for architects to do more than accept the status quo. We can no longer afford to stay silent and allow groups like the AIA (who had notably no presence at this national conference) to speak for us (or in this case, to not speak)—it’s crucial that we reach outside the studio to participate in these critical discussions of our time.