During 2022–2023, the School of Architecture hosted three symposia.

What Works: The Planning and Development Legacy of Alexander Garvin was held on October 6, 2022, in honor of Alexander Garvin (1941–2021). The symposium was organized by Antonia Devine, M.Arch ’13. Garvin, a graduate of the Yale School of Architecture and an adjunct professor for over five decades, was a multi-hyphenate of the built environment. He served under five New York City mayoral administrations in city planning and housing; he was also an architect, a private developer, and an urban planner. Garvin authored several critically acclaimed books, including The American City: What Works, What Doesn’t and The Planning Game: Lessons for Great Cities. A pioneer in the contemporary field of planning and development, his teachings emphasized the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of design and how successful architecture and placemaking were the direct result of “public action that will produce a sustained and widespread private market reaction.” In keeping with this spirit of cross-pollination, this symposium brings together a diverse group of Garvin’s former students and colleagues, themselves celebrated practitioners in the fields of journalism, planning, architecture, academia, and government, to discuss and debate three main topics close to Garvin’s heart: New York City planning from the 1970s onwards, the post-9/11 World Trade Center design competition, and New York’s ambitious bid for the 2012 Olympics.

Speakers included:

Laurie Beckelman
Marci Clark
Chris Glaisek
Paul Goldberger
E.B. Kelly
Michael Kimmelman
Daniel Libeskind
Gregg Pasquarelli
Joe Rose
Elihu Rubin

Notes on Peter Eisenman: Towards a Celebration, organized by Surry (Michael) Schlabs, was held on November 11–12, 2022, in celebration of Peter Eisenman’s long and illustrious career as an architect, thinker, author, and educator. Eisenman is a figure whose innovative work as a designer and tireless dedication as a teacher over the past half-century have helped form—and ever re-form—the field of architecture as we know it today. The event brings together a distinguished group of architects and historians, teachers and students, friends and colleagues to frame and explore Eisenman’s many extraordinary contributions to modern architectural discourse and to consider his legacy here at the Yale School of Architecture.

Speakers included:

Preston Scott Cohen
Wes Jones
Jeffrey Kipnis
Greg Lynn
Mary McLeod
Rafael Moneo
Joan Ockman
Robert A.M. Stern
Anthony Vidler
Sarah Whiting

In 1972, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, together with Steve Izenour, M.E.D ’69, published their treatise Learning from Las Vegas following a Yale design studio. This canonical text explores architectural communication in a new kind of automobile-oriented urban landscape. Its interdisciplinary methods helped change architecture and studio teaching in fundamental ways. Fifty years after the publication of Learning from Las Vegas, Denise Scott Brown: A Symposium, convened by Frida Grahn on February 8, 2023, presented new scholarship related to the groundbreaking studio methods, developed by Scott Brown during her teaching career in the early 1960s. Three panels, building on chapters in the recently published anthology Denise Scott Brown In Other Eyes: Portraits of an Architect (2022), edited by Grahn, offered new perspectives on Scott Brown’s intellectual formation, her research on determinants of urban form, her concern for social factors, and her advocacy for minimal design interventions in lieu of large-scale urban renewal, highlighting Scott Brown’s conceptual contributions, her distinct voice, and her incisive impact on architectural education and design.

Speakers included:

Denise Costanzo
Lee Ann Custer
Valéry Didelon
Frida Grahn
Izzy Kornblatt
Sylvia Lavin
Craig Lee
Mary McLeod
Sarah Moses
Joan Ockman
Elihu Rubin
Surry Schlabs
Denise Scott Brown
Katherine Smith