Got a wonderful gift in the mail today. It was a card from Robert A.M. Stern Architects, of the sort I often get, and which often give me pleasure. But this was more – more pleasure, because more photos of Yale’s new Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray residential colleges. Beautiful!

It is impossible to have too many for conveyance to readers.

Much of the Yale campus built in the decades before World War II was designed by James Gamble Rogers. Robert Stern, who led the team from RAMSA that designed the two campuses (including Melissa DelVecchio, Graham Wyatt and Jennifer Stone), took his inspiration from Rogers’s Collegiate Gothic, a refreshing break from the modernists who built most new Yale buildings since, including Paul Rudolph’s school of architecture, of which Stern was dean for quite a while until recently.

The photos printed with the card gave me fits to photograph myself for transfer to this post, since it was late afternoon before I got around to it, forcing me to use unnatural light. I gave up. I went online for shots. These come from a combination of the RAMSA and Yale sites, including RAMSA’s usual project mini-monograph and a Yale slideshow of photos by Michael Marsland. I’ve added a Yale publicity video of the campuses (unavoidably, Yale officials serve as talking heads), and a drone video of the campuses, and have taken some shots from these, and also I have added a very interesting time-lapse of the construction, which is followed by some video of scenes on the new campuses, from which I’ve taken yet more screenshots. Yet, inspired by the photography on the card, I went back and tried my best to reproduce them digitally for this post.

Dinner is approaching, so I am just going to slap them up as orderly as I can and hope for the best.

I can say that the top photo and first two photos below are by Peter Aaron/OTTO from the card from RAMSA, the next three are from the RAMSA website, and the next score or so are from Yale, either by photog Marsland or from Yale videos. Finally, there are shots from the drone video for Yale. The Yale time-lapse video from YouTube is here.

If RAMSA wants to send me a better version of the top shot, without the crease in the card so faithfully reproduced, I will happily sub it out. [Done.] Finally, I apologize in advance if some of these shots are either credited wrongly or uncredited. I will gladly print corrections. I put up with these looming credit woes because the photographs, by whomever, are so lovely. And credit for that goes to Yale, for insisting on such beauty in the first place.