Starting at the FitzRandolph Gate, take a video walk down memory lane as Graham Wyatt ’79 describes the history of Princeton’s campus and its Art Museum. Thanks to President James McCosh who moved the University’s art collection out of Nassau Hall, the Art Museum has stood on the same site at the heart of campus since the late 1880’s. Growing over time into the building we knew as undergraduates, it was then renovated and extended a number of times before Princeton announced construction of a bold and welcoming new Museum building in 2018. Now complete, it is scheduled to open on October 31, 2025. Yina Moore ’79 and Harry Toung ’78 will introduce us to the building itself, and Museum Director James Steward h67 h70 will join us for a discussion after the video presentation.

Designed by the architectural firm Adjaye Associates, in collaboration with executive architects Cooper Robertson, the new Art Museum’s roughly doubles the space for the exhibition, conservation, study, and interpretation of the Museum’s globe-spanning collections, and includes a new array of social gathering spaces and visitor amenities. At a time of self-reflection for both museums and universities, the design embodies the Museum’s long-standing commitment to serve as a hub and a gathering place, a nexus for the arts and humanities—a metaphor for the college campus at its best—that affords encounters with cultures past and present from around the world and seeks to foster stronger citizenship among its University, local, and global communities.

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Join us at 6:00 PM, Princeton time, on September 18 by clicking HERE

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Yina Moore ’79 is the President of the Witherspoon-Jackson Development Corporation, a 50-year old nonprofit agency she resurrected in 2015 that serves the longtime residents of Princeton’s Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood, the oldest Black neighborhood in New Jersey. The Princeton of her youth was a close-knit community that, along with her civically active parents, helped shape her vision for its future and beyond. Descended from a family that has lived in the Borough for more than a century, she attended Princeton public schools, graduated from Princeton University as an architecture major, and earned a master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Yina began a traditional architecture career working for a firm in DC, became director of education programs for the American Institute of Architects, and was then appointed to development officer of the Massachusetts Housing Finance Agency where she led the design and underwriting for Columbia Point and Tent City. Under her own consultancy, she worked with Citibank in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, the Southeast LA County regional planning, individual SoCal municipalities, and architect Charles Moore’s design center, Urban Initiatives. She directed the planning of the Newark Airport Station for NJ Transit and, after concluding heading joint development on Boston’s “Big Dig” as a consultant with Bechtel Parsons Brinckerhoff JV, she returned to Princeton for her daughter to enter first grade in the town's stellar school system. 

Yina joined the Cummins Engine Company as a general manager for the tristate area, became a top performer at the Fortune 500 company and then was selected as the principal consultant for an EPA-endorsed project that received recognition from the National Science Foundation for the early development of hybrid public transit vehicles. Around that time, she began her public engagement in Princeton by serving on the Site Plan Review Advisory Board and then served for 15 years on Princeton’s Planning Board, chairing the Planning Board’s Zoning Amendment Review Committee and its Circulation Subcommittee. Princeton’s President Emeritus Goheen and School of Architecture Dean Emeritus Robert Geddes asked her to chair neighborhood development and later co-chair the non-profit organization they founded, Princeton Future. Most memorable was her coordination of the resolution of issues of the proposed Arts Council renovation designed by her former professor, Michael Graves.

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The Nancy A. Nasher—David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director of the Princeton University Art Museum, Lecturer with the rank of Professor in the Department of Art & Archaeology, and a faculty fellow of Rockefeller College, James Steward h67 h70 has overseen all aspects of the new Princeton Art Museum. Firm in his belief that “The act of constructing a wholly new facility at the historic center of our campus is a testament to Princeton’s belief that a museum can and should play a fundamental role in the education of future generations,” James previously served as director of the University of Michigan Museum of Art. There, he oversaw the planning, design, and construction for that institution’s major new building. 

James holds a BA from the University of Virginia and a doctorate in the history of art from Trinity College, Oxford University. He has authored numerous volumes and curated major touring exhibitions ranging from the art of eighteenth-century Italy to Edvard Munch as well as the art of Betye Saar. He has received the Chancellor’s Medal for distinguished service at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a member of the Order of St. Petersburg and a Knight of the Royal House of Portugal, for services to art and education. 

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In the late 1980's, Harry Toung ‘78 was very fortunate to work directly with I.M.Pei, designing the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, a pioneering research center in Novato, California dedicated to finding cures for diseases of the brain such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinsons. Since then, in his private practice, he has designed apartments and houses for gallery owners and art collectors, but still does not feel he deeply understands how form may be tethered to meaning. During these periods of conundrum, he is drawn back to a time at Princeton, in his Junior year design studio, when Michael Graves told him that "Architecture doesn't seek solutions."

In Harry’s forty-five years as a teaching and practicing architect, modernism, post-modernism, deconstructivism, and neo-classicism have flashed across the trade journals like continuous reels of headline banners.  As it does, he wonders if each new era of design finally offers answers about the relationship of aesthetic experience to social form.

Harry’s current projects include an affordable housing complex in Hastings-on-Hudson, the Soundview Recreation Center in the Bronx, and homes in Perth Amboy and New Guinea. He also is Design and Technical Consultant to Snohetta NY. His teaching has included serving as a thesis adviser at the New School, a guest lecturer at Moscow Humanities University, and a visiting critic at Syracuse School of Architecture and his M. Arch. alma mater Columbia Graduate School of Architecture (where his fellow students included Graham Wyatt ’79).

Harry matriculated with the great Class of 1978, graduated with the great Class of 1979, and waived back into '78 after attending its 45th Reunion (his first Princeton Reunion) and helping with its 45th Reunion survey.

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With a firm belief in the power of architecture to advance education and enterprise, Graham Wyatt ‘79 directs the design of academic buildings, campus plans, and corporate headquarters around the world. He has worked on over 50 campuses across the country, from local elementary schools to international universities. He has directed master planning efforts at Georgetown University and Harvard Law School, and has led design on a diverse array of academic buildings, including the LEED Platinum, Net Zero certified Kohler Environmental Center at Choate Rosemary Hall. His commercial and civic work includes headquarters for companies like Gap, Comcast, and GSK, and institutions such as the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta. Currently, Graham is designing a new home for the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University and new buildings for the School of Music and Department of Theatre at the Ohio State University. His writings on the design of academic buildings, professional schools, and classrooms appear in publications including Building Type Basics for College and University Facilities (2003) and Designs for Learning: College and University Buildings by Robert A.M. Stern Architects (2016), and MyCos, the most widely read publication on higher education in China.