Bass Fellowship Established at Yale School of Architecture

The dean of Yale School of Architecture, Robert A.M. Stern, has announced the creation of the Edward P. Bass Distinguished Visiting Architecture Fellowship at the School.

The Bass Fellowship will bring distinguished private and public-sector clients to the School of Architecture on a regular basis to give students insight into the “real-world” development process and the architect’s role on a development team.

Gerald Hines, one of the world’s most renowned property developers, will be the first Bass Fellow.

“This is a path-breaking fellowship, ensuring that top class developers and their teams work side by side with distinguished architecture faculty and advanced design students,” says Stern.

Fellows, to be selected by the dean, will be drawn from the ranks of top leaders in the development community – i.e., private sector developers, government developers, corporate leaders or top institutional developers.

Throughout the course of a semester, the Bass Fellows will participate in a design studio led by a senior or visiting faculty member that will be organized around a development project with which the Bass Fellow is engaged. Other members of the fellow’s project development team will also be invited to participate in the course.

The Bass Fellows will also deliver a public lecture. Hines will present the first talk, “From Local to Global: Urban Development for the Twenty-First Century,” on January 10. Free and open to the public, the talk takes place in Hastings Hall of the A & A building, 6:30 p.m. Reservations are necessary: Call Jennifer Castellon at 203-432-2889.

“The Bass Fellowship promises to be a landmark undertaking in our school and a program of design inquiry that will influence architectural education well beyond Yale’s walls,” says Stern.’

Hines is founder, co-owner and chief executive officer of one of the largest real estate companies in the world. He has been hailed as a developer of vision, who is dedicated to the highest standards of building and to sound principles of urban

Founded in 1957 and based in Houston, his firm has offices throughout North America and Europe and in South America and China. The company has more than 700 projects to its credit, ranging from office skyscrapers, corporate headquarters and mixed-use industrial parks to planned residential communities, resorts and single-family homes. Philip Johnson, Cesar Pelli, I.M. Pei, Kevin Roche, Lord Norman Foster, Frank Gehry and Robert A.M. Stern are among the notable architects who have designed Hines’ projects.

As a Bass Fellow, Hines will teach in collaboration with Stefan Behnisch, the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor of Architecture. Behnisch, whose practice is based in Stuttgart, Germany, is the architect of the new, highly acclaimed, energy-efficient headquarters building for Genzyme, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The project to be explored with students by Hines and Behnisch will be the fashion museum and school to be built as part of the Garibaldi Repubblica development – an ambitious mulit-use project being planned for Milan, Italy by the Hines organization and its master-plan architect, Cesar Pelli.