School Notes: School of Architecture
January/February 2015

Brazilian developer to be Bass Fellow

Rafael Birmann joins the SoA as the 11th Edward P. Bass Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Architecture this semester. Established through the generosity of Edward P. Bass ’67, ’68BS, ’72Arch, this fellowship brings to Yale distinguished leaders in the development community who teach in advanced studios and seminars.

Birmann is president and owner of Birmann SA, a private real estate company that he founded with his father, Aron Birmann, in 1978, in São Paulo, Brazil. Two of their current projects are a 50,000-square-meter office building on a four-acre site in São Paulo and a 16-million-square-meter sustainable urban community in Brasilia that will house more than 400,000 people. For his Yale studio, led by adjunct associate professor Sunil Bald, Birmann will have students propose designs for a key portion of this project.

Yale competes in Solar Decathlon

For the first time, a team of Yale students has been selected to participate in the Department of Energy’s highly competitive biennial Solar Decathlon, which challenges 18 collegiate teams to design, build, and operate solar-powered houses that are cost-effective, energy-efficient, and architecturally pleasing. The Yale team will build its house on West Campus and ship it to California in time for the competition next October. Team leaders are undergraduate architecture majors Kate McMillan ’16 and Juan Pablo Ponce de Leon ’16, and they are joined by a team of several MArch students and many other undergraduate students in architecture and engineering. Yale Facilities and several architectural consulting firms have partnered with the students. Michelle Addington, the Hines Professor of Sustainable Architectural Design, is one of the project’s principal investigators. She taught a seminar/workshop course in the fall to guide the team through the theoretical and practical aspects of design and construction.

Yale women architects meet in NYC

Yale Women in Architecture, an association of students and graduates who address the legacy and status of women in the field, met in Manhattan in early December at Poets House in Battery Park City. The event included a tour led by the building’s architect, Louise Braverman ’77MArch, and a talk by Madeline Schwartzman ’86MArch, author of 365 Day Subway: Poems by New Yorkers.