Morse, rethought
On Feb. 17, 1959, architect Eero Saarinen ARC ’34 declared he had a new vision for residential life at Yale. The result was Morse and Ezra Stiles colleges.
According to Saarinen, the colleges’ rooms, which have no shared common spaces, were conceived in order to depart from the cookie-cutter pattern of existing Yale suites.
“Our primary effort was to create an architecture which would recognize the individual as individual instead of an anonymous integer in a group,” he wrote in the News.
Students at the time, after all, had expressed interest in having more single...
There is a persistent story (you could check if it is accurate) that a botched survey of the property on which Morse & Stiles were built led Saarinen to design the colleges 1/5th too big for the land. The University simply reduced the plans by that amount, rather than pay Saarinen again to change the plans. The reduction led to some rooms having no 7' wall along which to place the long university beds.