Architecture Students Add Some ‘Jimmy’ Character to Their Design
“Each year the houses get better and better, and I mean that in all sincerity,” said Yale School of Architecture Dean Robert A.M. Stern, at the dedication of the 2009 house designed and built by the school’s first-year students in the Hill neighborhood of New Haven.
The newest structure — a two-family house with bright orange exterior sheathing on King Place in New Haven — represents a continuum of First-Year Building Projects in New Haven. The house, which was dedicated on Sept. 24 and will be bought at cost by a disabled female veteran, stands between last year’s project — a dark, cedar-sided two-family structure — and the empty lot where the Vlock Building Project house will be constructed next year.
Newly named after James Vlock, a close friend of the program’s founder Charles Moore and a long-time supporter of New Haven, the Yale Building Project has been challenging new graduate students in architecture at Yale to design and construct socially meaningful structures since 1967, when Yale’s architects-in-training took off for Appalachia to build a community center in a small town there. For more than two decades, the students have been building affordable houses for financially qualified buyers in older neighborhoods in New Haven.
The basic rules of this non-elective course have changed very little since the First-Year Building Project shifted its focus to the local community: Teams of about 10 students compete to come up with the best design for a wood-framed house of a specific surface area for a specific site in a neighborhood where one “designer” home can set a new standard for the whole street. Critics look for ways the different teams have addressed particular challenges of the site, how the design of the house fits with the neighboring architecture and most economical use of limited resources, among other criteria. After the winning team is chosen, all the students in the class put down their T-squares and pick up their shovels to start digging for the foundation.
The program is often cited as the reason a student chose Yale over another design school. “It definitely figured in my wanting to come here,” said first-year student Nicky Chang, sizing up the empty lot next to this year’s house. A native of China, Chang is already planning to spend next summer helping to construct the 2010 house — for which, she adds with a twinkle of irony, she’s sure her team will have the winning design.
An estimated 23 houses in New Haven owe their existence to first-year Yale architecture students. The project has worked with several development agencies as clients, including Habitat for Humanity, Home Inc. and Neighborhood Housing. The challenge for many years was to create a single-family house of 1,500 square feet with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. When the non-profit affordable housing developer, Common Ground Community and the Veteran Affairs Office became the client a few years ago, the paradigm shifted. The main house, to be constructed for a single-mother, disabled veteran, must have an attached rental unit of about 500 square feet, which would enable the new owner to finance her new home.
This year saw a number of “firsts” and unique features that set the 2009 project apart from its predecessors. Adam Hopfner, the director of the project since long-time director Paul Brouard officially retired a few years ago, points out the unusual design of the exterior of the house.
“It’s essentially a prosaic gabled, square box,” he says. “But,” he adds, pointing to a rectangular wooden protuberance, with no apparent function jutting perpendicularly from the side of the building, “it has ‘Jimmy.’”
That’s not a technical term of the trade, Hopfner explains: “Jimmy” is the name the students gave to plywood additions they incorporated into the design of the house to punctuate and differentiate the boxlike character of the exterior and interior.
One reason the students felt they needed to add extra character to the house was because for the first time they were using a labor-saving, cost-cutting, energy-conserving building component called “SIP” (Structurally Insulated Panel). This is essentially a prefabricated panel that incorporates an interior and exterior section of the house, and, as its name suggests, keeps the cool air inside during the summer and the cold air outside during the winter.
While these prefabricated structures might have saved the builders extra labor and, over the long-term, reduced the energy drain on the environment, design-wise they created a challenging monolithic blandness that these architectural students felt obliged to address.
In the blog that the Vlock Building Project students wrote for Metropolis Magazine throughout the summer, they noted: “The dynamic between a simple gabled box (the SIPs) and stick-frame interior form is, design-wise, what this house is fundamentally about. … This design issue has been so complex and so subject to dispute that the interior form has had to be personified just to be able to talk about it.
“Enter ‘Jimmy.’”
Other details that make the new home distinctive include bamboo flooring and birch-wood paneling throughout the first floor, owner-occupied unit; a seamless wall of sleek black cabinetry and recessed refrigerator that form one side of the tenant’s kitchen; an iron stair railing connecting the first and second floors; tiled bathroom walls; ultra-modern fixtures; and what has been described as a “MOMA-worthy toilet.”
Brouard — who, despite his official retirement, is still very much a guiding presence for the Vlock Building Project — said that the word “craftsmanship” best summed up this year’s project. “I have never seen a house with this much detail, so masterfully crafted,” he said.
— By Dorie Baker
Media Contact
Dorie Baker: dorie.baker@yale.edu, 203-432-1345