On The Ground

Bucket List
Yanbo Li
M.Arch I ’26

Attend my friends’ reviews. Get dinner, lunch, breakfast, and coffee with them regularly and outside of Rudolph Hall. Go to East Rock more often. Sit down with professors and ask for life advice. Say no to opportunities that are actually burdens. Tell people I love them and I want them to stay in my life after all this is over.

The White Smoke Has Risen
Maggie Holm
M.Arch I ’28

“The Nest” is the chosen co-housing scheme for the 2026 Building Project! Formally collaging the low rectilinear BP24 house with the taller, more compact BP25 house, The Nest is a tiered split-level home that acts as the unifying bookend to the site.

Joy of Being Stressed Together
Marusya Bakhrameeva
M.Arch II ’26

I take the spring midterm week as an opportunity to push my project alongside others at school who are absorbed in their own deadlines. Work becomes more joyful when it is a collective endeavor. For the next two weeks, my cohort and I will mostly be alone in the building, giving our projects a solid push. The stress will still be there, but it will be shared only among our cohort, working late and filling the studio with nervous laughter.

Lectures and Naps
Layna Chen
M.E.D

M.E.Ds have been meeting weekly to discuss speakers for the M.E.D Roundtable and the Roth Symonds lectures. Progress was slow but collaborative.

A small gray mattress has been occupying a niche in the M.E.D corner. From time to time, someone wakes unexpectedly from an impromptu nap.

Networks from within and outside the school
Alberto Martínez García
Ph.D

In our weekly seminar, Ph.D students have had the opportunity to meet with professors from other universities to discuss their latest research, including S.E. Eisterer from Princeton University and Meredith TenHoor from Pratt Institute. These workshops have allowed us to see how scholars are working on topics of interest to us, like gender and the environment. Furthermore, it was exciting to see that the latest two Forum lectures by Esra Akcan and Irene Cheng were popular among master’s students, highlighting how similar interests are across programs.

2/05
Building Project students are shocked to learn that privacy and “minimizing friction” are of utmost importance to clients after proposing idealized schemes of co-living at midreviews.

2/16
Paprika Valentines! If you didn’t get one, know that we still love you.

2/17
PRISCILLA BARKER, CINDY LIU, and LINH MAI put together a Lunar New Year celebration featuring dumplings, calligraphy, and a terrifying pot of boiling molten sugar.

2/18
FERGAL TSE, MYUNGSUN KIM, ASAMI IGARASHI, and HAZEL LU employ projection mapping and very sexy CNC-milled topographies in the North Gallery opening of “Urbanism Negotiating Topography: Busan, Hong Kong, Osaka.”

2/22
A Nor’easter pays us a visit just in time to cancel the career fair cocktail hour and postpone the Building Project final. BIMAL MENDIS calls it YSoA’s first snow day since his undergrad years. Some firms trek through the storm anyway but hire nobody, leading to a handful of students dropping out to pursue modeling careers with DeWalt.

2/25
A spontaneous Fluxus performance organized by AYSEL AZIZ and MCKENNA SABON hits the 4th floor pit, inspired by Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit.

2/27
Building Project threshing session with Friends Center for Children picks Group C1! Announcement/celebration dinner is bumped from the traditional BAR to the back room at The Study. Tears are shed, as usual. Both happy and sad.

3/7
The start of spring break has a select few gallivanting off to India with ANTHONY ACCIAVATTI’s Green Revolution class, while others remain in New Haven to enjoy the first two weeks of Daylight Savings Time.