Yale Architecture

With the rise of the automobile in the mid-century, roadways became a uniquely American destination and a new form of architecture and urbanism arose to cater to the automotive traveler. This turnpike style is often disregarded as kitschy, touristy, or capitalistic, but the residue of this auto-centric era creates an ephemeral backdrop for highways in the current day. *Learning from Berlin (CT)* explores and commemorates Americana highway architecture using Berlin, CT as a local case study. The iconic Berlin Turnpike is a quintessential example of roadway infrastructure, a veritable ruin of a bygone era and once regarded as one of the greatest neon strips in the Northeast. We see the turnpike as an undervalued source of typological inspiration and an example of turnpike urbanism that holds valuable lessons about architecture as a semiotic tool. Relying on existing forms of Americana roadside pastimes, the exhibit is displayed as a series of miniature golf holes, each representing an iconic facade from the turnpike in its heyday. A miniature golf course is a microcosm of symbology and iconography in built form, and much like the architecture of the turnpike, the holes are totemic, whimsical, ironic, and fundamentally memorable. However, these totems are but cheap fabrications, representing the past character of the Berlin Turnpike where iconography and intrigue reigned supreme.

Groundwater Earth tells the hidden history of the largest distributed mass of freshwater on the planet. The fruits of groundwater are all around us: nearly half the global population drinks it and over half of all crops are irrigated with it. Groundwater extraction technologies are to agriculture and urban growth what the elevator was to the booming American metropolis of the early twentieth century. The exhibition traces for the first time the preposterous, practical, and perilous experiments with groundwater. It focuses on the Indo-Gangetic plains and Sonoran Desert—two major sites of experimentation with groundwater extraction since the nineteenth century. Combining over a decade of fieldwork in the Americas and Asia, with archival research undertaken in three continents and vast amounts of data collected using remote sensing satellites, Groundwater Earth examines the scales and slow-motion impacts of groundwater extraction on the tilt of the earth to the shape of cities and farms.

An exhibition of artwork by Professor Emeritus Alec Purves, On Looking, will be on view at the Yale School of Architecture Gallery from May 15 to July 6, 2024. The show gathers watercolors and travel sketchbooks spanning from 1965 to the present. Professor Purves joined the faculty at the School of Architecture in 1976. Since 1979, he has taught the Introduction to Architecture course that still provides a foundation for undergraduate majors. He served as Acting Dean in 1992 and co-directed the School’s summer drawing program in Rome from 2002–2015.