The rite stuff: New mace represents ‘rebirth’ of Yale Engineering

In 2022, the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science (Yale Engineering) began operating as an autonomous school with a distinct faculty. And with this new structure came new needs — including a deeply symbolic one. Yale Engineering needed a new mace.

This ceremonial staff, carried during each year’s university commencement, would represent Yale Engineering faculty and students — joining those of the residential colleges, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the graduate and professional schools, along with the university mace itself, an emblem of the authority of Yale’s president and trustees.

Luckily, a designer was close at hand: Jacob Eldred, a mechanical engineering major from New York City. Eldred, who graduated from Yale College this spring, had already produced insignia permanently installed in two Yale residential colleges — an 80-pound brass trident for Grace Hopper College, and a nine-foot-tall neon axe for Morse College.

When Eldred took on this latest project, he knew only that he wanted to make something that represented engineering’s history at Yale, captured the full range of the discipline’s remit, and somehow looked like engineering.

What that would mean unfolded over a design and fabrication process that took two years, roughly 1,500 hours of labor, more than a dozen collaborators, and multiple machining processes. It was almost entirely fabricated in Connecticut, with most elements created in Yale’s cabinet and machine shops.

by the numbers: The Yale Engineering mace

“This project was meant to be about Yale and by Yale,” said Eldred. “Yale University has some of the most talented artisans in the country — students and staff — who can make anything you want. And the mace highlights that not only can we design this, not only can we show it off at graduation, but we can make it ourselves.”

The resulting mace “truly represents what I think is the rebirth of Yale Engineering,” said Jeffrey F. Brock, the school’s dean and the William S. Massey Professor of Mathematics, who, along with Vincent Wilczynski, Yale Engineering’s deputy dean, recruited Eldred to the project and supported him throughout the process. “It represents the full spectrum of ideas and departments and faculty and intellectual emphases. The fact that it was created by one of our undergraduates is kind of a crowning notion for what this piece of pageantry and symbolism should represent on behalf of the school.”

Form and function

While Eldred was focused on engineering in his academic career, he had also pursued a wide range of artistic expression, including photography, furniture making, neon bending, and letterpress printing, and worked one summer in the studio of artist Matthew Barney. (Art also runs in his family: his grandfather, Charles J. Eldred, was a sculptor, working primarily in brass, and a professor of art at the State University of New York at Binghamton.)

“I think that art and engineering are functionally the same thing, just at opposite ends of technicality,” Eldred said. “Engineering is problem-solving purely technically, and art is problem-solving mostly aesthetically. And if you have that skill set, you can apply it anywhere along the spectrum that you want.”

For Eldred, the greatest challenge sprang from the freedom artistic design afforded. “The shapes reveal themselves in engineering because they just meet whatever function you have. The shape of a bridge truss is the shape of the force curve of the truss,” he said. “And in an artistic piece that is not true. How do you think of an arbitrary shape, where do you get the curves from? I couldn’t just draw them — it needed to be something from somewhere.”

He took inspiration from a wide variety of sources — the collection of medieval maces in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the princely treasures contained in the Green Vault in Dresden, Germany, the natural illustrations in Albertus Seba’s “Cabinet of Natural Curiosities.” He also studied the Yale mace, which is made of silver gilt. Eldred found particular resonance in the overlapping silver elm leaves engraved into one of its spherical elements — a motif he drew upon for his own design.

He also paid tribute to the forms and shapes of engineering itself, while ensuring that multiple disciplines could find themselves in it. “It’s supposed to look like a kind of textbook diagram from any of the departments, from any of the majors,” Eldred said. “It could look like a textbook diagram of a blood vessel, or of data or power flowing through a cable, or of kind of a chemical mixer, or of a turbine or a rocket.”

And, finally, he considered how to represent the field’s progression through time — from handcrafted curves through the straight, replicable lines produced by machines, to the fluid forms now enabled by advanced manufacturing.

The final design balances these organic and mechanical shapes, moving from the walnut, cherry, and maple roots at the mace’s base, to a centerpiece of repeated, abstracted copper and brass elm leaves, and culminating in a crown of mirror-polished stainless-steel petals, held in place by a 3-D printed, stainless-steel stem.

In moving from design to fabrication, Eldred leaned on the expertise of Nick and Vincent Bernardo, brothers and expert machinists who direct the Yale Engineering and Gibbs machine shops, respectively. “Every idea I had, I ran by one or both of them,” said Eldred. “And they really are brilliant and helpful and generous with their time and expertise, and they were essential to getting the project done. It would not have happened without them here.”

Other students also contributed, from Eldred’s computer-science-major roommate, who wrote code to produce the random array of dots that speckle the lower shaft, to his classmate Archana Sharma ’24, who hand-drilled the almost 1,200 precise holes the code produced.

While the final push to finish the mace was arduous, said Eldred, the final product — 12 pounds, just over 4 feet long, crafted of aluminum, brass, copper, stainless steel, and wood — fulfilled the premise he’d set out with two years before. 

“It was the perfect way to end college,” said Eldred, who carried the mace into Old Campus during the recent commencement celebration. “Making a physical object and seeing it done was itself very gratifying. But getting to walk around campus with it felt like a distillation of the effort.

“The effort was all there, and I was holding it.”