Should Yale’s New School of Organization and Management Demolish
and Replace these two important Whitney Avenue Buildings?

The School of Organization and Management currently occupies several mid-19th-century villas on Hillhouse Avenue, a setting that perhaps reflected– and even nourished–its persona as a nontraditional business school with special interest in nonprofit organizations. Under President Richard Levin and new Dean Joel M. Podolny, however, SOM has been reinventing itself along the lines of more traditional business school models, and with its new identity has come the desire to be relocated in more modern architectural structures to reflect this change.

The new site is planned for an area across from the Peabody Museum on Whitney Avenue, at the very edge of campus. This remote location resembles that of Harvard University’s Business School, which is on the other side of the Charles River and away from that university’s central campus.

 ARCHITECTURE

 But two buildings currently occupy the site planned for SOM, both of which were originally constructed for the Security Insurance Company in the early 20th century. The older of these, located at 175 Whitney Avenue, was built in 1924 to designs by Henry Killam Murphy, an architect with ties to Yale. Murphy, either on his own or in partnership with Richard Henry Dana, designed the Yale Hope Mission on Crown Street and numerous New Haven houses, as well as the Yale-China Association’s campus in Changsha. His papers can be found at Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library.  At right, rotunda of 175 Whitney More of this story in our SpringNewsletter PDF.