专业描述

Architecture's relationship to the wider world it serves continually evolves but always there is at its core an unchanging belief that the act of building is in and of itself a great and ennobling undertaking. In too many schools students and teachers now seem disinterested in building, distracted by cyberspace and ​a search for ways to transform the art of building into something else. Architecture is not a branch of information science; it is not a kind of electronics. At Yale we continue to believe in architecture as the most palpable of all the arts and the most public, the art of the here and now, the art of making and preserving fixed places that are the settings for the interaction of people and ideas over time. At Yale, we hold the act of building paramount: the logical manipulation of environmental closure in the service of particular functions and symbolic purposes. This is our overwhelming preoccupation; this is the quintessence of architecture as an art and as a profession. We are wary of trends masquerading as ideas. In a time of hyper-specialization Yale remains committed to a broad and deep generalism. To be effective, an architect must recognize and respond to a host of factors that taken in their totality describe the architectural problem which a building represents: a building is not the solution but a solution. We embrace the complexities and the contradictions of the contemporary, recognizing that today's issues are not for architects to tackle in a vacuum. Architecture is a collaborative art, embracing local community groups, as in the affordable house that is our annual First Year Building Project, and environmentalism represented by our on-going collaboration in design and research with the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. New Haven, one of America's most representative cities, remains a principal canvas of our investigations into urban issues, but we also turn our attentions to New York and to a number of international sites including Berlin and Shanghai. The fundamental philosophical breadth of our approach is not only curricular and geographical but also artistic; we refuse to promote a single conception, artistic or otherwise, of what architecture is or might become. We recognize our obligation to the historic moment in which we study and teach and build, but we also recognize that that moment, however unique, is neither singular nor unchanging nor disconnected from the past or the future. Some would argue that in our postmodern era architecture has shifted from an objective to a subjective realm, and that, as a consequence, authority for judgment has passed from traditional measures of function, history, context or even technology to one dominated by psychological criteria, giving rise to a mood architecture obliged only to appeal to the tastes of clients or a limited coterie of aficionados. We are not so sure but we certainly recognize the psychological approach to our art needs to be examined along with those of other specialized, deterministic methodologies. Architecture is never one thing; it is a constellation of possibilities. A university is about open questions and not about definitive answers.