Construction Update: September 2011

The forms currently rising on the 4.25-acre site of the new Yale SOM campus are known as sheer walls. Designed to provide structural support to the building, they’ll hold stairways, elevators, and vents. They don’t yet present a picture of what the finished building will look like. But that will soon change. The concrete at the 242,000-square-foot Edward P. Evans Hall is almost all in place. Since May, 10,000 cubic yards of concrete have been poured. The two underground floors—an additional 85,000 square feet that will hold parking and some program space—are set, with the ground floor concrete not far behind. In October, the 4,750 pieces of steel that will comprise the building’s skeleton are expected to begin arriving. If everything goes according to plan, the 20-foot steel pieces, added to the structure at the rate of up to one every six minutes, should all be bolted in by March. It’s at that point that the campus should begin to look a little like the architect’s renderings. The structure was designed by Foster + Partners, the prominent firm chaired by Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate Lord Norman Foster ARCH ’62. When completed, Evans Hall will house state-of-the-art classrooms, faculty offices, academic centers, and student and meeting spaces organized around a welcoming enclosed courtyard, all intended to create a teaching and learning environment that will support the school’s innovative integrated MBA curriculum and enhance the Yale SOM community. Once the steel is up, the building will be enclosed in a temporary sheathing, which will allow work to continue through the cold-weather months, including the installation of more than four hundred thousand pounds of ductwork. Beginning in spring, the plan is to begin installing 130,000 square feet of glass of eight different types. Much of the outside glass will have iron blended into it, a process that makes it perfectly clear. The final year or so of the project will focus on finishing the interior and landscaping. Full-sized trees will be brought into the 25,000-square-foot courtyard and planted in more than four feet of soil laid over the parking garage, while inside, 782 doors will be hung using 30 different hardware configurations.

Watch a video taken at the site of Edward P. Evans Hall:

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