Yale | Payne Whitney Gymnasium | Payne Whitney building | Maya Lin

Okay, Claire, back to you: So, then, you were destined to go to school in New Haven?
I always took for granted that I would go to Yale. I had known that I wanted to act since I was about five years old, and I heard that Yale had a leading acting department. My grandfather actually commissioned the architecture/design building at Yale. During one summer, my dad helped build it, and I took a lot of my art classes in that building. It's kind of a monstrosity. I mean, it's ridiculed and almost reviled, made mostly of concrete. So, I always felt almost spooked when I was in that building, because my grandfather had helped envision it and my dad had helped build it, and there I was, using it.

Where would you send a first-time visitor to New Haven?
At Yale, outside of the library, there is an amazing memorial sculpture by Maya Lin, who did the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. It's called the Women's Table, and it commemorates the women who have attended Yale. It's gorgeous. It's one of my favorite things in Yale. It's just a really beautiful piece of art and a great idea. The Payne Whitney Gymnasium is also really interesting. The story is allegedly that a family would only give money if it was going to be used to build a religious building, named after Payne Whitney [class of 1898], and so what they did is they had the gym made to look like a church. [The Yale Daily News, October 6, 1999: "The Whitney family matriarch intended the building to be a church. Incapacitated and senile, she grew unable to oversee the project herself and entrusted the project to her two young grandsons, with whom Yale struck a separate deal. While weight rooms and indoor pools were built inside, the facade of the Payne Whitney building was to remain Gothic and churchlike, so the boys could chauffeur their feeble grandmother by to review the progress being made on her 'church.' "]