By Timothy Cahill ’16 M.A.R.
A sculpture of massive granite blocks and flowing water will be a centerpiece of Yale Divinity School’s Living Village when it opens later this year, the creation of three Yale School of Architecture students whose design was chosen by a panel of judges last fall.
The fountain-like artwork, titled Confluence, is inspired by themes of unity and welcome that also define the sustainable student-housing complex itself.
The winning designers, Ellen Zhu, Julie Edwards, and Cole Quist, are all second-year students in the School of Architecture’s three-year Master of Architecture I Professional Degree program. Confluence was chosen from among 16 submissions by SoA students for a competition sponsored by YDS and completed over a single weekend in September 2024. The judges were from both the Divinity School and the School of Architecture.
The victorious team’s intent was to create a work that represented the Divinity School’s diversity of people and religious perspectives brought together on common ground. “The idea is the gathering of difference around something unifying,” said Quist about the design of three large stones from which water will continuously flow. “All the waters move toward a central point,” he explained, and the murmur of the steady cascade “will provide a beckoning backdrop of sound for the courtyard.”
The Living Village, scheduled for occupancy in August 2025, is designed to meet the rigorous sustainable-building standards of the Living Building Challenge, through use of solar power, non-toxic building materials, and sustainable water management as well as attention to health, equity, and beauty. A key component of the project is its advanced system of water capture, storage, treatment, and reuse, which will regulate and balance the building’s overall consumption at virtually net zero while sending no runoff down Prospect Hill. Boston-based Bruner/Cott is the lead architect for the project.
Confluence will anchor the main courtyard entrance to the student residence hall. “The purpose of the [sculpture] is to act as an introduction” to the building’s ethos, said Bruce McCann, Living Village project manager, “to represent water as a precious resource and essence of life.”
The sculpture’s message echoes the words of YDS professor Willie James Jennings, who, speaking of the Living Village, observed that “the way we work with water, treat water, produce, sustain, and pass along the gift of water, says everything about how we value life.”
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Confluence will consist of three granite blocks arranged as if in conversation around a circular catch-basin. A computer-generated image of the work shows the stones rough cut along the sides, each a different shape and size, presenting a diversity of both appearance and personality. Each stone will have a flat, polished top cut with an oval hollow or trough. Water will continuously bubble out of these hollows, spill over the sides of the stones, and collect in the basin below.
As collaborators, the architecture students brought perspectives from their distinct backgrounds to the project. Zhu, who grew up outside San Francisco and has a B.A. in architecture from Carnegie Mellon University, spent three years in Japan, absorbing lessons of Eastern aesthetics and materiality. Edwards, whose architecture major was at the University of Washington, drew on both the intuitive artistry of her sculptor father and the analytical precision of her physician mother. Quist, originally from Hoboken, N. J., earned an undergrad architecture degree from the University of British Columbia, where he focused his studies on landscape design and the larger natural environment.
What emerged as the three students worked over their notebooks and computer screens the weekend of the competition was a design “about people coming together and sharing space,” Edwards explained. “It felt right to have three stones sharing that unifying circle. I keep coming back to this, because the three of us at that table, and now the three stones … they feel embodied.”
“Each of the stones was very individual—none of them wanted to feel like they were similar to the others,” Zhu added. “That’s where the variation in height came in, the variation in their shape.”
While the student designers assign no overtly religious meanings to their work, they understand how such interpretations might be applied by the YDS community. It could be said, for instance, that the “confluence” of the work’s title is the way it will activate the Living Village as a site, broadly speaking, of communion and congregation. And, inevitably, the work also evokes the integrating presence of the Holy Trinity.
With the coming of spring, the design team has begun working with Ryan Ackerman, the stone cutter and fabricator who will manifest their vision into its finished form. Ackerman, a fourth-generation master sculptor, owns Monty Ackerman Sculpture, the company founded by his grandfather in Quincy, Mass. He is consulting with the students to refine their design to meet the demands of the sculpting process and technical requirements of plumbing the sculpture and incorporating it into the building’s water system.
The raw blocks, which will range in size from three to five tons, will be sourced from a Glastonbury, Conn., quarry and transported half an hour south to Deep River, where Ackerman has set up a temporary worksite. The sculptural work, a process of drilling and splitting, cutting, grinding, shaping, and smoothing, will begin in April, with a delivery date of May 31.
Confluence, with its blending of rough stone and craftsman’s refinement, “fits perfectly with my body of work,” Ackerman said. “The students are thoughtful, nice people, and the design they came up with is fantastic. This is not a forceful sculpture, but primarily a natural one which emphasizes the beauty of the stone.”
For Zhu, Edwards, and Quist, working with Ackerman will be, quite literally, a master class in technical and finished design, materials, fabrication, and logistics. But the sculptor thinks the greatest lesson of the project will reveal itself over time.
The significance of the commission “is a bigger deal than they may realize at the moment,” Ackerman observed. “In the future, they’re going to be able to say, ‘I was one of the designers of this sculpture, of this water feature, which is going to be here for a century or more.’”
Timothy Cahill ‘16 M.A.R. is a writer specializing in religion and the arts.
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YDS will host a Living Village Grand Opening on October 6. Learn more about the project.