Intro to Reality

For first-year architecture students, the Yale Building Project represents a deep dive into the practical realities of design and construction. Call it Architecture 101. By summer’s end (scheduling gods permitting), this second-semester master’s course results in a finished building. The latest addition to this venerable design/build tradition, which was begun in 1967 by Charles Moore, is a handsome cedar-clad house, completed last September in a working-class neighborhood just south of Yale-New Haven Hospital.

The 2008 Yale Building Project—a 2,100-square-foot, two-family home, made in partnership with Common Ground and the Connect­i­cut Department of Veterans’ Affairs—also represents a shift in student thinking. There are Yale Building Projects scattered all over New Haven. In recent years, most of them have announced their design intentions in fairly conspicuous ways. There is no mistaking the “Yale house” in some neighborhoods. Over time, budding architectural ambition caused friction with the program’s previous partner, Neigh­borhood Housing Services.

“Some of those houses were hard to fill,” says Alan Organschi, studio coordinator for the Building Project. “They were a little too quirky. We were getting strange, brokered designs because some students were trying to swing for the fences. And this small developer very rightly made the point that their clients are first-time homeowners—sometimes in the whole history of their family—and didn’t want to live in a notorious house. So a few years ago I thought, Maybe we need to change the program. I got in touch with Rosanne Haggerty, of Common Ground, knowing that they handled extremely complex architectural issues in their work.”

For Common Ground, this was an opportunity to experiment with a new development model and, with the help of the VA, tackle the growing problem of homeless veterans. The collaboration on a house designed and built in 2007 proved so successful that a site large enough for the next three projects was acquired. Work on the 2008 house began in March, when 64 students were presented with the program: a wheelchair-accessible, owner-renter residence on a corner lot, using sustainable materials and energy-efficient systems and intended for a female veteran and her family. Seven students each produced a scheme with full construction drawings in just three weeks.

The winning design, which became known internally as the Muji house, has a stripped-down aesthetic that the faculty judges thought would make it easier and less expensive to build, giving it the added potential of serving as a prototype for future projects. “The students were also really sensitive that this house should not look so discordant with the rest of the neighborhood that people would see it and say, ‘Oh, there’s where the poor veteran lives,’” Haggerty, president of Common Ground, says.

Prior to the May ground-breaking, the class elected officers who would be responsible for everything from budgets and schedules to community outreach. (Two, Helen Brown and Carlos Zedillo, procured more than $100,000 worth of donated materials.) The construction process itself became a crash course in building. “The majority of students had never even picked up a circular saw,” says Thomas Brady, who worked for the duration of the project, including an eight-week summer stint. “But by mid-June, they would show up and couldn’t wait to get their hands on the tools.”

The project also provided another important lesson: design does not stop at the drawing board. “When the summer crew started,” Brady says, “Adam Hopfner”—the project director—“lined us all up and said, ‘We’ve got these twenty-five outstanding design issues that need to be addressed. Let’s take a week and resolve them.’ So at some point, every person who actually banged a nail on this place had a hand in the design of it.”

Shockingly, the house came in on time and on budget. The VA had lined up an interested buyer early on, but in the end her mortgage fell through. Still, it seems unlikely that a spacious three-bedroom house with a 600-square-foot rental unit—and a $207,000 price tag—will remain unsold for long. Nor will the lot next door stay conspicuously empty: work on the 2009 Building Project is already under way.

Related: All summer long, students from the 2009 Yale Building Project are blogging about the design and construction of their neighboring house over on Metropolis POV.