I think that on campuses, buildings teach.
I think they teach the students
subliminally about the value of place and architecture and craft
and this building would be a great representation of that.
A building like this is a sensory building.
The wood has its own aroma and color and richness.
It has light.
It has its own sound.
And it already has its own mythology.
It has many stories to tell.
It would be impossible to come in this building, spend time here,
and not remember it.
This building is a very iconic building
where it’s situated, close to the edge of campus
with its tower on the New Haven skyline...
It claims itself as a destination.
The humanities are about research in balance with collaboration
and in balance with engagement with communities of thinkers and enthusiasts.
The concept here was of a unified humanities environment.
It would have been very difficult to casually bump
into somebody from another department in the building the way it was.
It wasn't a building that spoke to collaboration and commonality.
These departments were scattered.
Some of them were here
but French and Italian and Spanish was over on Wall Street above the pizza place.
Then if you wanted to go to comp lit, you had to go to 451 College.
German was across the street.
You can't build something whole when everything is fragmented.
You have to be able to bring the fragments together.
We're very well known for being a place of the humanities,
a place that has a singular leadership role in the humanities,
not only in the United States, but also around the world.
Bringing them together into a single location
is really an opportunity
to draw together in a physical way, the commitment
we have always had in a spiritual way.
The idea of creating common ground in a building
that had been rather cellular so that there was a flow in the building
was one of the challenges.
This was an incredibly complex process.
It's a lot of choreography between understanding the end users' desires,
working with the architect with design aspirations,
working with the construction manager
for constructability, and putting that all together.
Renovating a building is a lot more challenging than building a new building.
For me, one of the most exciting things was thinking how we could make it better.
There was always a desire to preserve the architecture of this building.
It's such an iconic building.
James Gamble Rogers did many of the buildings on campus
and there's an expectation of ornamentation and detail
that people expect when they come into Yale buildings.
The idea of a larger footprint became very appealing because it could offer us
the structural spans to support the big collaborative and instructional spaces
without having to tear apart a valued historic building.
We put in 12,000 square feet of underground space
that never existed before.
And there's a state of the art lecture hall and film screening room down there.
We have a courtyard that's really a roof now for another building.
The fact that we had to construct
below the water table and underpin the foundations
for the entire perimeter of the courtyard, including a 15 storey tower.
We had to dig down 30 feet, dug out thirty thousand cubic yards of soil.
Those are just mind-boggling exercises in and of themselves.
The entry sequence into this building is very grand.
You have these beautiful brick arches that welcome you right away.
You can go left or right and be in a light filled hallway now
that is adorned with offices and classroom space.
The building brings together 15 different departments and programs
Near Eastern languages and civilizations sits on a floor with directed studies.
Film and media studies
sits adjacent to our Department of Italian language and literature.
History is now co-located with units that study
the literary traditions in each of the regions of the world.
I can work with professors and hear the lectures
that they bring in, work with grad students.
We took many existing corridors and we actually widened them.
We created spaces where people could sit down, have a cup of coffee, see some people.
These are connective spaces and they're intended to be used in a very fluid way.
Now, they have lots of small little rooms for conferences that we can immediately just grab
another professor, move into a room and talk, and widen out the conversation.
You have an access to the tower, which in itself has a beautiful lobby.
Swenson Tower will be home to graduate students from across a range of departments.
The new stair that connects the entrance foyer to the lowest two levels
required a complete structural rethink of that part of the building.
It's designed to invite people.
When I walk to the building now, it's so easy to imagine how
a great lecture could be given in the lower level lecture hall.
And you walk out with someone that you're sitting next to and have a conversation
in the beautiful reception space right outside that lecture hall.
Maybe you decide there that it'd be great to continue that conversation
in your offices, which are only two floors away.
I think we always strive to bring people together in ways that they don't expect.
And this project specifically will do that.
We're going to have a lot more interaction among the faculty.
And hopefully for the students, they will develop interests they didn't plan to develop along the way.
Now this building is a building that speaks to not only
the need for privacy and individual research,
but also the opportunity for the chance encounter, the collaboration, and bringing people together.
Yale would be the first to admit that it hadn't seen much updating or improvement
in many decades.
If you look at the plan of the building, it's a complex plan.
The whole basement level, which is now the concourse, was loaded with steam piping.
So we had to be very creative about how to route everything
behind the beautiful architecture.
We've probably never met a building before that had such resistance
to upgrade in its structural composition.
There was also the challenge
of making the building fully ADA compliant, fully accessible.
That is a big deal.
And to try to do that in a way that's very sensitive to
the architecture is very challenging as well.
In order to restore a lot of the detail in this building,
we did rely on really good crafts people, many of them local.
We replaced all the windows.
We salvaged two hundred and eighty four panels of art glass.
Most of the millwork was carefully restored.
We had a local vendor restoring all the ironwork.
All of the historic lighting
was sent out to be refurbished with energy efficient LED.
And then there's quite a lot of new lighting to supplement that.
This didn't just happen.
This was planned, monitored, and executed
in ways that took time and care
and work.
Structurals, mechanicals, civil, lighting designers, the landscape architect...
You know, there was a cast of thousands.
Hundreds and hundreds of unique individuals worked on this particular project.
A lot of local New Haven residents.
To add it up we say it's six hundred and thirty thousand hours
went into the renovation of this building by a wide variety of people.
You pull these things off because you have people who just never give up.
And that tenacity is part of the success story of this project.
If there is one thing I'm most proud of, it's how well we worked as a team.
I hope that this building will say something about
optimizing existing conditions in ways that are innovative.
There's the historic nature of the building from ground floor up,
and then there's a much more modern intervention from concourse level down.
And I hope it'll say something about making a building that's available
to everybody who uses it by the way, that it's organized.
It's James Gamble Rogers 2.0, if you will.
It's a 21st century building now.
I hope the students really understand
the value of the humanities through this building.
When you walk into it, you can't help but feel inspired of what could be possible.
That we as a university decided to take one of our central iconic campus buildings
to rebuild the space in ways that encourage collaboration
in the humanities
is a signal to the world that we are committed to this area of excellence.