SC Connecticut News

In 2022, the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science (Yale Engineering) began operating as an autonomous school with a distinct faculty. With this new structure came new needs, including a deeply symbolic one: Yale Engineering needed a new mace.

This ceremonial staff, carried during each year’s university commencement, would represent Yale Engineering faculty and students—joining those of the residential colleges, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the graduate and professional schools, along with the university mace itself, an emblem of the authority of Yale’s president and trustees.

"The fact that it was created by one of our undergraduates is kind of a crowning notion for what this piece of pageantry and symbolism should represent on behalf of the school," said Jeffrey F. Brock.

Jacob Eldred, a mechanical engineering major from New York City who graduated from Yale College this spring, designed the mace. Eldred had already produced insignia permanently installed in two Yale residential colleges—an 80-pound brass trident for Grace Hopper College and a nine-foot-tall neon axe for Morse College.

When Eldred took on this latest project, he aimed to create something that represented engineering’s history at Yale, captured the full range of the discipline’s remit, and looked like engineering. The design and fabrication process took two years, roughly 1,500 hours of labor, more than a dozen collaborators, and multiple machining processes. Most elements were created in Connecticut at Yale’s cabinet and machine shops.

"This project was meant to be about Yale and by Yale," said Eldred. "Yale University has some of the most talented artisans in the country—students and staff—who can make anything you want. And the mace highlights that not only can we design this, not only can we show it off at graduation but we can make it ourselves."

The resulting mace "truly represents what I think is the rebirth of Yale Engineering," said Jeffrey F. Brock, dean of Yale Engineering. He added that it "represents the full spectrum of ideas and departments and faculty and intellectual emphases."

While focused on engineering academically, Eldred also pursued various artistic expressions including photography, furniture making, neon bending, letterpress printing; he even worked one summer in artist Matthew Barney's studio. Art runs in his family; his grandfather Charles J. Eldred was a sculptor working primarily in brass.

"I think that art and engineering are functionally the same thing just at opposite ends of technicality," said Eldred. "Engineering is problem-solving purely technically; art is problem-solving mostly aesthetically."

Eldred faced challenges due to artistic freedom in design compared to functional shapes in engineering projects. He drew inspiration from sources such as medieval maces at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; princely treasures in Dresden's Green Vault; natural illustrations in Albertus Seba’s “Cabinet of Natural Curiosities”; and studied overlapping silver elm leaves engraved into spherical elements on Yale's silver gilt mace.

He ensured multiple disciplines could find themselves represented: "It could look like a textbook diagram...of data or power flowing through a cable...or kind of chemical mixer...turbine or rocket."

The final design balances organic-mechanical shapes moving from walnut-cherry-maple roots at its base to repeated abstracted copper-brass elm leaves culminating into mirror-polished stainless-steel petals held by 3-D printed stainless-steel stem.

In moving from design-to-fabrication Eldred leaned on expertise from Nick-Vincent Bernardo directing Gibbs-Yale Engineering machine shops respectively: "Every idea I had ran by them...they really are brilliant-helpful-generous-time-expertise essential getting project done." Other students contributed too including computer-science-major roommate writing code producing random array dots speckling lower shaft classmate Archana Sharma hand-drilling almost 1-200 precise holes code produced.

Though arduous final push finishing-mace product weighing twelve pounds measuring over four feet long crafted aluminum-brass-copper-stainless steel-wood fulfilled premise set out two years before: “It was perfect way ending college,” said Eldred carrying-mace Old Campus recent commencement celebration adding “Making physical object seeing done gratifying walking around campus felt distillation effort holding.”