Yale - New Haven
This panorama explores Yale’s complicated, and almost parasitic, relationship with New Haven. The Ivy League School, with its $42B endowment, exists in stark contrast with a city plagued by poverty, homelessness, and crime.
Aside from the usual ‘town-gown’ tensions, this embittered relationship is stained by years of gradual expansion and encroachment of the university campus into its surrounding areas – leading to displacement of small and medium sized businesses to the periphery, and to eventual gentrification causing both (i) socioeconomic displacement and (ii) a shift in racial demographics.
There is also the issue of Yale’s reluctance to make a fair contribution to the city. The university owns 800 of 12,000 acres of the city’s most valuable real estate, while contributing only a fraction of what it would have to pay if it were taxed – taxes that would otherwise have contributed to the city’s growth and to the welfare of its least privileged residents.
This panorama attempts to illustrate this parasitic relationship. In the Black & White Bristol print, the Yale campus seemingly exists in a camouflaged harmony with the city of New Haven – monumental but without malice, blending in with the city, sharing in its image.
However, scanning the panorama with an AR device enabled device will reveal, to the viewer, what the relationship is truly like.
Student Project for 'Scales of Design' - at the Yale School of Architecture.