HONOR AWARD

The 12,200 sf Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking, located at Yale University in New Haven Connecticut, establishes a beacon for university wide interdisciplinary collaboration. The center, submitted by WEISS/ MANFREDI Architecture/Landscape/ Urbanism, brings students from diverse disciplines together to create innovative solutions to real world problems. The program, unique to Yale University, is based around team workshops that allow students to bring their ideas to fruition.

The building’s unique, elliptical form is centrally positioned in a courtyard of stepped orthogonal structures. 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 replaces 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 have received 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.

The Gramercy Residence is a full renovation of, and addition to, a turn of the century townhouse in the Gramercy neighborhood of New York City.

The goal of the project was to celebrate the 1890s townhouse and at the same time craft a modern home where the clients could retreat from the intensity of the city.

O’Neill Rose Architects used the idea of a vertical gradient to organize the program. The lower level spaces are intimate and inviting, with an inner focus on socializing with family and friends. Both the garden level and the parlor level kitchen are more intimate spaces that open up to the cloistered back yard. Both spaces have custom furniture that the firm designed with collaborators, which allow for family gatherings both small and large. As you move further up the house, the spaces gradually open up to the larger environment of the city. The very top floor is crafted to blur the line between inside and outside so that you can reconnect with the city just beyond. With large angled windows, a sculptural skylight, interior glazing, and a rear terrace with an occulus open to the sky, the top floor is a continual dialogue between inside and out, and between home and the city.

This vertical gradient strategy of the intimate lower level spaces to the expansive upper levels created a modern home in the shell of a traditional New York City building.

Interiors Gramercy Residence

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

SUBMITTED BY: O’NEILL ROSE ARCHITECTS