By the time the 2012 International Festival of Art & Ideas opens in June, the organization’s executive director, Mary Lou Aleskie, hopes to have unveiled a new pavilion on the lower part of the New Haven Green. The temporary structure, which will house the festival’s information center, will be designed by Yale School of Architecture graduate students in a spring semester “Assembly” seminar.
“We’ve had intersections with the School of Architecture in the past,” Aleskie said. “So, I think the School of Architecture and its faculty have had a general awareness and an intersection with the festival for a long time.”
Aleskie said Yale School of Architecture students and faculty felt that they needed a “hands-on practicum that would result in the realization” of a completed design-build project, and that students approached the festival about being a “client.”
The project will be the focus of the above-mentioned “Assembly” seminar, which will be taught by Yale School of Architecture Critic Brennan Buck.
“The idea of this class,” Buck said from the New York offices of the architecture firm FreelandBuck, of which he’s a principal, “is to get some real-world experience” though designing and building a small structure.
Buck said students in the seminar will probably spend about half the spring semester designing the structure and the other half building it.
The project will be made possible by the Yale School of Architecture and local sponsorship, which the students secured.
The look of the festival’s information center “is something we grapple with each year,” Aleskie said. “We have some real challenges, because we can’t really spike” on the lower part of the New Haven Green, referring to securing the structure on a particular site.
In addition to addressing such practical issues, Aleskie said the architecture students will design a distinctive look for the structure.