Name: The Plan 168
Brand: The Plan
Price: 15.00 EUR
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By Raymund Ryan - 2 March 2026

Tradition “cannot be inherited”, wrote the Anglo-American poet
T. S. Eliot in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” back at the dawn of Modernism, “and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour”.¹ A product of America’s old WASP establishment, Eliot is today best remembered for radical poetry which may appear fragmentary, and hence “modern”, yet is deeply rooted in the canons of Western literature. His advice to contemporary writers – and, by extension, one imagines, to all those in creative endeavor – was to foster what Eliot called “the historical sense”, a “perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence”.

Past and present are now mutually dependent at the
long-established Yale Divinity School. The Living Village is the chosen name for this expansion to one of Yale’s smaller component institutions, a signal in itself of ecological and communal intent. It is not of course surprising that a divinity school should herald ethical priorities. Nevertheless, the ethics evident at Yale are less to do with Old School religion and more with evolving ideals of sustainability and social inclusion. The new project, to one side of a very traditional quadrangle, is alive not merely in technological alertness (to energy consumption etc.) but also in its relaxed air, its permeability to pedestrian life, and its figurative response to the historicist “original”.

The principal buildings at the Divinity School were built, not long after Eliot wrote his essay, on the outer fringes of Yale and of its host city, New Haven, Connecticut. Designed and built in the 1930s by an elite traditional practice, Delano & Aldrich – architects for the stiffly formal, even inert, U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1930) – the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle, while clearly indebted to Thomas...