Assembly One Pavilion | Yale School of Architecture first-years

The result of groundbreaking computational and material sciences, the ‘Assembly One’ pavilion was created by first-year students from Yale School of Architecture as part of a 40 year tradition at the school where first-years come together and design/build a house. Students participated in a seminar and design studio focusing on alternative ways in which contemporary buildings can be put together and how advances in material sciences and computational techniques can inform and assist this process. A statement from the students reads, We treated the tenets of digital fabrication as basic assumptions – our ability to efficiently produce variable and unique components and the cultural implications of moving beyond standardized manufacturing. But, we were less concerned with the uniqueness of the objects we created than on the novel types of tectonic expression they allowed.

Designed to act as an information center for New Haven’s summer International Festival of Arts and Ideas, the students used three fundamentals to guide their process: Dynamism, Visual Transparency, and Visual Density. The pavilion is dynamic in its form and ‘presentation’- solid and massive for one point-of-view, almost weightless and entirely porous from another. It has visual transparency by way of the thousands of thin aluminum sheets from which it is formed. These open up on two sides for ventilation and security and funnel views towards the main stage. And visual density. Again, the panels. These shift in color and reflection as one moves around the structure, creating an incredibly dense and ‘deep’ field of view. The pavilion was on display and functional through June.

Courtesy of Yale School of Architecture first-years