Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning

Client: Yale University
Location: New Haven, CT
Size: 31,600 SF
Completion: January 2017
Tags: Higher Education Libraries Historic Interiors

Helping young people prepare to thrive in a world of perpetual change demands programs that advance the evolution of the educational process. These programs need architecture that enables new pedagogies and creates laboratories to reinvent them, approaching teaching and learning as experimental, iterative processes with students as change agents.

Yale’s new Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) demonstrates the special opportunities and challenges of programming and designing for these dynamic programs and their transitioning organizations.

Yale assembled CTL from previously segregated and separated groups devoted to helping students study, write, and research. It also creates to an organization for improving faculty, and staff learning and teaching methods, for example, using new technologies. Yale’s decision to locate CTL in Sterling Memorial Library gives it visibility and accessibility, symbolizing Yale’s importance as a leading research institution in teaching and learning, and equipping Sterling to join other evolving libraries as a collaboration center.

Using the existing structure of columns and walls to create distinct precincts that unobtrusively draw together similar activities while separating different activities creates intelligible space that helps users orient themselves and understand how to use the space. The resulting facility creates a welcoming, inspiring place for fostering community centered on innovative teaching and learning.