Yale School of Architecture Students Harness the Sun

As part of their effort to provide affordable housing, students at the Yale School of Architecture have constructed the first home in New Haven to use solar photovoltaic panels to produce electricity.

The new home at 590 Orchard St. will be dedicated at a ceremony open to the public and the media at 5:30-7 p.m. on September 22.

Each year, the new architecture students at Yale build a house for a family of low or moderate income. Called the First-Year Building Project, the program offers beginning architecture students a unique experience in design and construction, as well as the opportunity to deal with such challenges as budget constraints, client needs, neighborhood context and environmental sustainability. The required program, often cited by students as their reason for attending Yale’s prestigious architecture school, is now in its 39th year, and has included the construction of 16 homes in New Haven.

The Building Project is a competition. Teams of students devise models for an affordable single-family home of 1,500 square feet that will rise on a specific site in New Haven. The client for the project is Neighboring Housing Services, which makes the completed house available at low cost to first-time homeowners. A jury composed of Yale faculty and representatives of the housing service choose the winning design, and students construct the house themselves.

The housing service funds only part of the total cost of the house, and students seek donations from manufacturers and commercial suppliers for most of the building materials. In addition to getting a hands-on education in building, these architects-in-training have a chance to use many of the newest and most innovative products on the market.

This year the five teams of ten students had a new challenge: to incorporate a cutting-edge, solar-powered energy system into their designs.

Committed to using environment-friendly materials, fuel-conserving technology and renewable sources of energy whenever possible, the students secured support from the Connecticut Clean Energy Fund to pay for a state-of-the-art sustainable energy system. The system consists of roof-mounted photovoltaic panels providing 50 percent of the electricity needed by an average family, reports Paul Brouard, who has directed the
Building Project for 33 years.

The design ingeniously incorporates the 16 solar panels in a way that makes them invisible from the street and from almost any angle on the ground, a feature that favorably impressed the judges. The winning design “accommodates the solar panels, but doesn’t announce them,” said Gabrielle Brainard, a student who worked on the project. Henry Dynia, the long-time housing service representative to the Building Project, said the home was the first house in New Haven to use the solar technology, as well as the first student-built home to do so.

In addition to providing half the energy the new homeowners will need, the photovoltaic system has a wider benefit. Rather than using batteries to store solar energy that is not being used, the photovoltaic system reroutes the unused energy to an electric grid shared by neighbors. The electric company that serves the house credits the homeowners for the electricity their solar panels generate.

The student designers see the cost benefit of the photovoltaic system as an incentive for other affordable housing ventures. Brainard said the families who qualify to buy Building Project houses would benefit from a technology that would “normally be out of their reach.”

“The most exciting thing about this house is something you don’t see, but you will feel in your pocket book, and that will make the planet smile,” Dynia said.

“Solar photovoltaics is a viable technology for use today in Connecticut residences,” said Lise Dondy, chief operating officer of the Connecticut Clean Energy Fund. “We were pleased to support Yale School of Architecture’s project as a way of introducing future architects to the benefits of incorporating solar energy into the design of residences.”

The site chosen for this year’s Building Project is a residential neighborhood between Whalley and Dixwell avenues. Students had to balance their contemporary architectural vision with the traditional character of the neighborhood. The result is a clapboard-sided two-story house that, while incorporating many modern architectural elements, manages to blend in unobtrusively with the single-family homes on the block that date from the beginning of the 20th century.

“The roof has a unique structure,” said Brouard. In the front, the house barely looks different from its neighbors, but the A-frame of the roof “morphs into a modern shape” in back, he said. To achieve the “horse saddle” shape of the rear part of the roof required that it be constructed piece by piece, a painstaking task.

Other unusual features of this year’s Building Project house include a side entrance serving as the “front door,” and a large skylight in a cathedral ceiling that brightens the kitchen, living and dining areas of the home. The skylight places the major source of natural light above, and substitutes for side windows, giving the homeowners more privacy.

“I was interested in a school that actually values building,” first-year student Brainard said of choosing the Yale School of Architecture for its celebrated Building Project. “It really was a good educational experience.”