Image Courtesy of Jacob Eldred.
Every year at commencement, ceremonial maces are displayed and paraded through Old Campus. A gleaming trident hangs in the Grace Hopper dining hall. In Morse, a neon axe looms over students as they eat dinner. What do this mace, trident, and axe have in common? The answer: Jacob Eldred (YC ’24).
In his four years at Yale as a mechanical engineering major, Eldred built a legacy for himself through art and engineering. He designed the mace, trident, and axe to hold symbolic significance that far exceeds their decorative value. The Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science only became its own school in 2022, and Eldred’s mace represented this autonomy. Grace Hopper College was renamed in 2017, and the trident symbolized revived student spirits and a reckoning with Yale’s history. After the isolation imposed by the pandemic, the axe was an electric start to Morse’s homecoming.
“[My work] comes from a place of understanding materials and manufacturing. Some art is interested in form and tries to hide the fabrication techniques, but I am more interested in being guided by the constraints of a technique,” Eldred said.
While some might think that art and engineering are different, Eldred is a firm believer that the two crafts are very similar if approached in a specific way. “To me, the problem solving in sculpture and mechanical engineering are very similar. There are no arbitrary shapes. Beyond cost, structure, and fabrication, engineers might consider heat or vibrations, and artists might attach political or historical ideas to their forms, but the method of creating shapes that make sense within some value system [is] the same,” Eldred said. When talking about how to synthesize art and engineering, Eldred offers a piece of advice: everyone should take some form of a craft class, even if just to make small things to decorate a dorm room. “Exerting control over your environment and making physical objects are two of the most satisfying things a person can do,” Eldred said.
Three months after graduating, Eldred reflects on his time at Yale fondly. When not designing nine-foot neon axes or building machines to study the coronavirus, Eldred loved to listen to the many speakers that visited Yale, with the goal of seeing five to ten speakers per term. He recounts incredible talks from film directors and Nobel laureates and still remembers missing one speaker by three seats on the waitlist. When asked about his favorite classes, Eldred mentioned that he made sure to take as many non-engineering classes as possible, two of his favorites being on Indian national security and the nature and politics of rivers. And, of course, some of his favorite memories are in the MechE shop, a guided workspace available to students, and making art with his mentors Nick and Vinny Bernardo at the SEAS and Gibbs shops at Yale. Eldred said he cannot thank them enough: “They are brilliant machinists and thoughtful teachers, and they helped shape how I see the world by working with me on all of my projects.” Nick helped on the axe and the trident, while Vinny made the first machine Eldred ever designed for a lab. These two mentors were originally trained as manual tool and die machinists but are able to make anything out of metal, Eldred said. “It was a privilege working with them, and Yale should do everything it can to keep well-staffed shops open to students. If they weren’t here, I would have received half the education I did,” he added.
Currently, Eldred is pursuing a masters in mechanical engineering at Stanford University. Although he now lives on the other side of the country and is represented by a tree instead of a bulldog, he will always be a part of Yale for what he was able to give it: community.