Courtesy Duo Dickinson
The Yale Building Project has a relatively new name: The Jim Vlock First Year Building Project. Don’t let the new branding fool you: not too much has changed about it, except a widening and progressively hyperlocal focus. And that’s a good thing.
This program, intended to get Ivy League School of Architecture students into the nitty-gritty work of construction, has been around since since 1967. At Yale, it’s mandatory for all first-years. The project now results in a single-family house in an economically depressed neighborhood.
But few students, and perhaps fewer New Haveners, know the origins of the program. Founded by former dean Charles W. Moore and faculty member Kent Bloomer, it was meant to get pasty-faced academics out of the studio and building something. Moore saw the project as a way for students to commit to positive social action by building for the poor.
But “the poor” didn’t always have an eye towards New Haven’s low-income neighborhoods. The earliest projects were outside of the city, and included community centers in Appalachia and a series of park and folly structures in Connecticut. Then, partnerships starting with Habitat for Humanity, started creating donated structures for deserving families in New Haven. That grew to Neighborhood Housing Services, Common Ground, and NeighborWorks New Horizons.
Thirty years ago, those first four houses with Habitat for Humanity New Haven were both experimental and revealed how architects, homeowners and building technologies could be at cross-purposes. At the time, Yale and Habitat worked together, and Habitat New Haven did only renovations and used a variety of volunteers to do that work, along with donated materials to create a few places to live in existing neighborhoods, preserving existing housing stock.
Yale wanted to mesh with that mission, but wanted to have the students design new homes in competition within the class, creating multiple designs that residents reviewed. But seeing models and drawings usually meant that the occupants were simply grateful for a home, and did not put a fine critique to the home’s utility. In short the problems of use, community fit and maintenance meant the relationship ended in the early 1990’s with Habitat creating a committee to generate a easy to build prototype based on factory workers housing. What replaced the student-designed buildings was a simple echo of the 19th century Winchester Arms workers’ housing.
About 80 new Houses have been built in the 20-plus years since Habitat separated from Yale. About 20 houses have been built by Yale students during that time. The original 4 Yale/Habitat houses have all undergone post-occupancy renovations, one involving fair radical surgery. the 80 Habitat prototypes have evolved in their technological execution and evolved with changing codes, but are, in truth, a,aging successful in their communities.
These good works are literal gifts: but in the world of rarified Ivy Grad School Aesthetics, Habitats vinyl clad boxes are simply irrelevant to the mission of aesthetic exploration, and the Yale homes for Habitat did not stand up to Habitats mission of low maintenance houses that fit into the neighborhoods Habitat is committed to reviving, one house at a time.
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Nice house. Looks like someone did not spend a lot of time coming up with this plan for it.
This is what they learn in Yale how to put up a sq. house! Now some plants would be nice.