Environmental Sciences Facility to Foster Scholarly Collaboration and Access to Peabody Museum Collections

Yale University today held a groundbreaking ceremony for a building to support collaborative research and teaching in all the environmental sciences, and to house significant portions of the University’s natural history collections.

The Environmental Sciences Facility will be constructed adjacent to the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and half the new building’s space will provide a climate-controlled home for many of the museum’s valuable specimens and other collections.

The building will also house laboratories, classrooms and other space for the departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Geology and Geophysics, and Anthropology, the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies.

“We are constructing a state-of-the-art facility that will encourage collaboration among faculty and students pursuing environmental studies, as well as place the resources of the Peabody Museum at their fingertips,” Yale University President Richard C. Levin said. “We expect this exciting interdisciplinary approach to bring environmental research and teaching at Yale to new levels of excellence, and add to our society’s knowledge of the past, present and future of the natural world.”

Joining Levin at the ceremony were Provost Alison Richard, Peabody Museum Director Richard L. Burger, Professor Karl K. Turekian, director of the Institute for Biospheric Studies, and Edward P. Bass of the Yale College Class of 1968, whose gift to Yale established the biospheric institute and supports the Environmental Sciences Facility.

Construction of the three-story, 98,000-square-foot facility is scheduled to begin in the fall of 1999, and the projected completion date is early in 2001. All floors of the building will have connections to the Peabody Museum, and there will be a connection on the second floor with Kline Geology Laboratory.

The design architect for the project is David M. Schwarz of David M. Schwarz Architectural Services, Inc. of Washington, D.C., and the architect of record is GSI Architects, Inc. of Cleveland, Ohio.