Every Monday until August, first-year graduate students at the Yale School of Architecture are blogging about their progress building an affordable, accessible owner-renter residence in New Haven. Click here to read the previous posts.

The front view of the house as of last Friday, with last year’s house looking on. Photos: courtesy the Vlock First Year Building Project

“Could we PLEASE forget about last year’s house?” The question, hopelessly optimistic, comes from our program director, Adam, during a recent class meeting to decide on finish materials for the house. A student had defended his opinion on our roof color based on its relationship to last year’s house, and Adam wasn’t buying it. Some in the class nod in agreement. Others roll their eyes. Yet Adam’s resolve to make construction decisions independent of influence from the 2008 project is not nearly as simple as it might seem—in fact, the relationship of the two houses has spawned a continuous stream of debate since the design selection in early May. Read more…

Every Monday until August, first-year graduate students at the Yale School of Architecture are blogging about their progress building an affordable, accessible owner-renter residence in New Haven. Click here to read the previous posts.

The house at the start of a recent morning shift. Photos: courtesy the Vlock First Year Building Project

It’s 2 a.m. My back hurts. My calves hurt. I’m so exhausted that I can barely keep my eyes open. These are all clear signs that I’ve come to end of another long week on the Yale Vlock Building Project. This dark, cold hour of the night, when the streets of New Haven are already deserted, used to be the peak of activity in the studio. But now the studio is empty, and my morning routine begins when many an all-nighter was just ending, at 6 a.m. Read more…

Every Monday until August, first-year graduate students at the Yale School of Architecture are blogging about their progress building an affordable, accessible owner-renter residence in New Haven. Click here to read the previous posts.

Left: A student poses with a high-pressure nail gun. Right: the house prior to the SIP installation. Photos: courtesy the Vlock First Year Building Project

By the start of this week, however unskilled we remain, most of us have at least gained some degree of construction experience. In week three, every student was put through three exhausting five-hour shifts of loading and unloading construction materials, firing nail guns, balancing on ladders, and hammering (and missing) nails. One could say that our bronze tans were scorched by this shared baptism by fire. By the end of the week we had poured the basement slab, laid the carrying beam, covered up the basement, and finished the stud wall framing for the ground floor. That left us in anticipation of the SIPs’ (structural insulated panels) arrival on Monday. Read more…

Every Monday until August, first-year graduate students at the Yale School of Architecture are blogging about their progress building an affordable, accessible owner-renter residence in New Haven. Click here to read the previous posts.

My hammer-swinging experience previously being limited to the occasional bookshelf assembly and picture-hanger installation, I had little idea of what to expect when I arrived at the Yale Vlock Building Project site last Thursday afternoon. While building began last Monday, our class of 49 students is now divided into four construction teams, each working a different three-day, five-hour shift. And though I had spoken with other classmates about the progress made earlier in the week, including updates on the foundation and floor framing, I hadn’t actually visited since the groundbreaking ceremony, when excited neighborhood kids had monopolized the hardhats. Read more…

Every Monday until August, first-year graduate students at the Yale School of Architecture will be blogging about their progress building an affordable, accessible owner-renter residence in New Haven. (Click here to read the first installment.) This week: the ground-breaking ceremony.

The author breaking ground with three local children. Photos: courtesy the Vlock First Year Building Project

The forecast last Saturday called for rain, but when I arrived at the site there was not a cloud to be seen. This was a lucky break for me, as I had spent the last two months coordinating and planning Yale’s first Vlock Building Project Ceremonial Ground-breaking. I saw the ground-breaking as our class’s opportunity to introduce itself to the neighbors. After all, we would be sharing very close quarters all summer. In the end, the event served a much deeper purpose—to foster mutual understanding and respect between two communities who live in the same town but rarely seize the opportunity to interact. Read more…

Every Monday until August, first-year graduate students at the Yale School of Architecture will be blogging about their progress building an affordable, accessible owner-renter residence in New Haven. In this first installment, Matthew Zych reports on the rocky transition period between the selection of the winning student design and the start of construction.

Dean Robert A. M. Stern leads a lively discussion during the design selection. Images: courtesy the Yale Building Project

The phase “revisions to winning design” sounds entirely too innocent. The weeks following final design reviews in architecture schools are generally characterized by a welcome reduction in pace and panic of the students—and yet here we stand a week after a crowd packed into a final studio review to watch our critics and clients select a student-designed house to be constructed for the 2009 Yale Building Project, and the anxiety in the studio has not tapered in the slightest. As we work on revisions to the chosen scheme, the “we’re done!” feeling we so long for after a final semester review has been absorbed by the sobering reality that we now need to bring 48 ambitious and diverse students to a consensus on how to move this project from paper to a building. It gets better: we break ground in one week. Read more…