Yale is one step closer to starting construction on the new School of Management campus.
Michael
Morand ’87 DIV ’93, University associate vice president for New Haven
and state affairs, submitted to the Board of Aldermen last Tuesday a
proposal to start the construction. At its biweekly meeting tonight,
the Board of Aldermen will begin to discuss the SOM development, as
well as a license agreement to install utility lines underneath the
site, which is located on Whitney Avenue and Sachem Street.
“We’ve
been working on the plans, facilities and University planning,” Morand
said in an interview Friday. “And for more than a year, we’ve had
conversations with the neighbors … as well as the [SOM] staff.”
The
proposal, a routine process for creating large-scale developments in
the city, is officially called a “planned development district,” or
PDD. According to zoning law, developers create PDDs to ensure that the
aesthetics of construction projects are fully integrated into the
adjacent neighborhoods.
The City Plan Commission, which advises New
Haven’s governing bodies, including the Board of Aldermen, on zoning
matters, will hear Morand’s proposal Nov. 3. The PDD will likely have a
Board of Aldermen hearing in December, Morand said, adding that there
has already been a permit filed to remove the existing buildings from
the site.
But some local preservationists said University officials
should keep intact the two existing onsite buildings, at 155 and 175
Whitney Ave. Chris Wigren, a member of the New Haven Preservation Trust
who wrote an article about the demolition of Whitney Avenue buildings,
said he was concerned that the design, created by the firm led by Lord
Norman Foster ARC ’62, does not respect the architectural character of
the neighborhood.
“One of the things that kind of bugs me about the
very few renderings of Foster’s buildings I’ve seen [is that they] do
not show the other buildings or other surroundings,” Wigren said Sunday.
In
response, Morand said Yale officials and the SOM students will receive
more benefits from a new facility than the two old buildings.
Morand
added that University officials considered the neighborhood when
planning the campus. They once discussed designs for a tall structure
but scrapped the idea to make the new campus fit with the nearby
buildings, he said.
Still, some community leaders said the proposed
SOM campus — a modern structure with a glass facade — has been a
subject of controversy. Jane Jervis, president of the Lincoln-Bradley
Association, a coalition of neighborhood residents, said a proposed
loading dock for the SOM campus could bring unwanted noise and debris
to the adjacent homes on Bradley Street. She added that during the day,
the light that reflects off the building’s glass surfaces will become a
nuisance, and during the night, the lights in the building will disturb
the neighborhood’s nighttime darkness.
“[But Yale officials] have
been very responsive to our concerns, to the extent possible in a
project of this magnitude,” Jervis wrote in a Sunday e-mail.
The SOM campus is slated to be completed in 2013, Morand said.
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发表于 2009-10-8 10:34:00
