The Jim Vlock First Year Building Project

Since 1967, the Yale School of Architecture has offered its first-year M.Arch I professional degree students the unique chance to design and build a structure as part of their graduate education. Unique among architecture schools, this program is mandatory for all members of the class. The Building Project typically results in a dwelling in an underprivileged neighborhood.

Charles W. Moore, who headed Yale’s Department of Architecture (later the School of Architecture) from 1965 to 1971, founded the First-year Building Project in collaboration with faculty member Kent Bloomer. Moore saw that getting out of the studio and building something would have several benefits for the students. As a believer in simple tectonics and basic technologies, he hoped students would be inspired by the mechanics of building. In the midst of the student unrest of the 1960s he saw the project as a way for students to commit to positive social action by building for the poor.

For more than four decades, Paul Brouard (M.Arch ’61) oversaw the Building Project with tireless dedication. As Director of the Building Project, Paul worked with over 2,000 students in the studio and the field to service the community by building housing, camp structures, clinics, and town gathering spaces. His demeanor and commitment to the pedagogy of design-build allowed students to learn by doing, thus fostering discovery, growth, and compassion. As he stated, “The building projects have given my students an opportunity to develop a sense of humor and perspective about architecture. The drawn line turns into a blob of concrete, the measured frame becomes a battered thumb, and the considered detail bends to a negotiated nightmare of code and material… Students have practiced their skills in leadership, organization, craftsmanship, and design. But all of them have formed an opinion about how the process works.” His students Alan Organschi (M.Arch ’88) and Adam Hopfner (M.Arch ’99) have followed in his footsteps since the early 2000s in directing the Building Project.

The earliest projects were outside of New Haven, and included community centers in Appalachia and a series of camp buildings in Connecticut. Reduced budgets in the 1970s and 80s, as well as increasing pressure on student schedules, led to a scaling back of the program and projects-which included several park pavilions-were confined to the New Haven area.

More recently, partnerships with Habitat for Humanity, Neighborhood Housing Services, Common Ground, Neighborworks New Horizons, Columbus House, and currently Friends Center for Children, have led to a focus on affordable housing. The houses allow students the experience of working with a client and the opportunity to respond to the challenges of affordable housing and urban infill. Students have shown great enthusiasm for these projects focusing on community development and neighborhood improvement. Many of them arrive at school with a desire to include such socially responsible work in their future professional lives. Having the opportunity to participate in the design and construction of such building projects often reinforces their dedication to do so.

Students in the Jim Vlock First Year Building Project returned to the site in New Haven’s Fair Haven Heights for the third summer in a row, adding one more home to the new campus of Friends Center for Children, an early childhood education organization. This year, in addition to providing housing for a teacher, students were tasked with providing a community space for the use of the entire campus, or “village.”

The site lies down the hill from the previous years’ houses on a slope behind an existing single-family home. Behind a driveway and a small parking lot, the compact new structure will rise three stories. The community space will occupy the first floor, its leading corner filled with floor-to-ceiling windows and the rear tucked into the slope. The upper two levels are housing: entering either through a door and stairwell on the first floor or via a porch from the second floor, the resident has access to a living room and kitchen on the second floor and a bedroom, with bathroom and laundry areas, on the third floor.

This year, Building Project director Adam Hopfner is joined on site by assistant director Louis Koushouris (MArch ’23). There are other new aspects to this year’s project as well: the cladding is thermally modified pine, which improves resistance to water and insects. It will develop a patina with time but will remain resilient to environmental factors.

The stairs and cabinetry are being constructed offsite on Yale’s West Campus, to save time on installation and onsite construction. But as much as one plans, the process of construction always holds surprises. “It’s a bit like designing the plane as it’s flying,” says Koushouris. “We have design meetings multiple times a week, if not daily, as the construction process demands, resolving precise details and corner conditions, keeping the water out of the building, and adjusting site work in response to existing ledge and bedrock.” As always, the Building Project is a learning experience.

The 2024 Jim Vlock First Year Building Project, the second in collaboration with client Friends Center for Children, resulted in a single-story home in the Fair Haven Heights neighborhood of New Haven. The home, located just behind last year’s project in what will become a four-house campus, will house two early childhood educators and their families.

Students began the spring semester of their first year working in teams to design different options for the site. The selected proposal, chosen at a February 21 review characterized by a client-initiated Quaker “threshing” process, was then refined and developed by all first-year MArch I students for the remainder of the semester. The house’s single story preserves neighbors’ views across the site to the New Haven skyline, as well as between last year’s house and future houses in toward the rear of the site. Special features include skylights and a green roof, as well as a full-length porch that also opens the views to residents.

After a successful six-year collaboration with Columbus House, the Jim Vlock First Year Building Project is now partnering with a new non-profit client, Friends Center for Children. The Friends Center for Children, which provides early childhood care and education for children ages three months to five years, seeks to create a campus with housing for their early childhood educators.

The 2022 Jim Vlock First Year Building Project is sited on 164 Plymouth Street, in a residential neighborhood tangent to an active rail transport. This year’s house marks the fifth collaboration with Columbus House, a New Haven-based provider of services to populations dealing with homelessness. Students were tasked to create design proposals that could mitigate the sound of the train, respond to climate conditions, maximize the limited lot size, and ensure a safe and comfortable environment for the residents.

The 2020 Jim Vlock First Year Building Project is sited on the interior of a residential block in New Haven’s Newhallville neighborhood. First-year M.Arch I students were able to design the two-unit, single-story structure before pandemic-related shutdowns. This year’s house marks the fourth collaboration with Columbus House, a New Haven-based provider of services to populations dealing with homelessness. Construction onsite took place in the late summer and autumn of 2020, with tenants moving in in early 2021. The design of the house explores circular economies of waste reduction, relying on sustainable timber construction.

Concept:

The “Triple-Decker” is a New Haven traditional vernacular in which single level units are stacked three high. Each unit has access to a porch. Students embraced this typology as a response to the tall adjacent buildings and connect to the existing vernacular. The parti is an L-shaped unit with the void that forms the garden/porch. A typical floor plan is stacked and rotated on each floor. An enclosed exterior stair serves the second floor unit and an interior stair serves the third floor unit. A prefabricated kitchen/bathroom core acts as the dividing element that creates public and private spaces within the unit.

For the first time, the Yale School of Architecture is partnering with Columbus House, a non-profit organization that has been providing solutions to homelessness in the New Haven area since 1982. Columbus House provides emergency shelter and a continuum of housing and services designed to help people who are homeless or at risk move towards independence.

This year’s brief targets a 1,000 square foot house of two separate dwellings, to be located on a lot in New Haven’s Upper Hill neighborhood. Students are challenged to develop a cost-efficient, flexible design that tackles replicability in material, means, and method of construction with an emphasis on prefabrication and modularity.