New Haven, Connecticut, USA
Weiss/Manfredi designed this 12,200-square-foot Center for Innovative Thinking in order to establish a beacon for university wide interdisciplinary collaboration.
The Yale pavilion won a 2020 American Architecture Award from The Chicago Athenaeum and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies, and it was awarded a 2022 International Architecture Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
The center brings students from diverse disciplines together to create innovative solutions to real world problems. The program, unique to the university, is based around team workshops that allow students to bring their ideas to fruition.
The pavilion was built on top of an existing laboratory in a plaza surrounded by the Becton Center, Dunham Labs and the Sheffield Sterling Strathcona Building.
Set near the middle of the courtyard it has a concrete base and slim steel columns around the perimeter.
The building’s unique, elliptical form is centrally positioned in a courtyard of stepped orthogonal structures.
It is enclosed by glazed exterior walls, which are 22-feet high (6.7 metres) and have a gentle rippling shape.
The glass skin’s reflective and transparent quality allows the pavilion to act as a chameleon, mirroring the surroundings and campus activity by day and creating a destination imbued with luminosity at night.
Curved transparent glass walls encourage circulation through and around the center and allow the rest of the university to see and participate in ongoing work.
Indoor and outdoor connections between the center and the adjacent landscape will establish this section of the campus as a new circulation route and a new home for innovation.
Within the center, continuous sightlines throughout unite spaces of creation and critique, encouraging interdisciplinary discourse.
The open studio, conference and breakout spaces create opportunities for spontaneous discussion and provide a link between public areas and adjacent instructional spaces.
In keeping with Yale’s commitment to sustainability, the project will replace the current underused paved plaza with a new planted garden, significantly reducing storm runoff and encouraging activity year-round.
The building and the plaza renovation are currently on track for LEED gold certification.
The combination of connectivity, sustainability and new collaborative spaces will transform the existing plaza and establish the Center for Innovative Thinking as a new interdisciplinary learning environment that cultivates innovators, leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs in all fields and for all sectors of society.
Project: Tsai CITY Center for Innovative Thinking Yale University
Architects: Weiss/Manfredi Architects
Client: Yale University
Structural Engineers: Thornton Tomasetti Associates
Photographers: Weiss/Manfredi Architect
