A new single-story house fits snuggly on a shady hillside in the Fair Haven Heights section of New Haven.
Steel cladding on its façade is intentionally rusted, evoking a reddish-brown sandstone ledge — a remnant of a former rock quarry — that faces the house’s front door. The rectangular structure’s low profile is in deference to neighboring homes on the hill above, preserving their views of the cityscape. The flat roof is covered in native vegetation, a kind of “living” roof that reduces stormwater runoff and also adds a strip of green to the neighbors’ vista.
The house was conceived and constructed by Yale School of Architecture students as part of the Jim Vlock First Year Building Project. The annual project, a core element of the curriculum in the school’s professional architecture degree program, offers first-year students the opportunity to design and build a home within the city for residents who might otherwise struggle to afford one.
We educate future leaders in architecture and design and, through our curriculum and community, strive to shape a more just, sustainable, and beautiful built environment.
In this case, the building will provide a home for two educators with Friends Center for Children, an organization that provides affordable early-childhood care and education in New Haven. The Yale project and Friends Center are engaged in a five-year partnership to create a five-house “village” on the two-acre parcel that will house up to 10 of the center’s educators and their children or other dependents. It is part of the center’s Teacher Housing Initiative, which addresses both the crisis in childcare and affordable housing by providing 20% of the center’s educators with rent-free homes, substantially increasing their take-home pay.
Last year, the partnership produced its first dwelling, a two-story, street-facing house where two educators with young children now live. The new house sits in a wooded area a short walk behind the first.
“Our Teacher Housing Initiative is an innovative, first-of-its-kind solution that supports our essential workforce — our teachers — through free housing,” said Allyx Schiavone, executive director of Friends Center for Children. “It is a model designed to shift systems.
“We see you, Yale students, we see your passion and commitment,” she added. “We see you thinking about the role that architecture can play — not just in creating beautiful physical spaces but also thinking about the role it can play in shifting systems of oppression.”
Indeed, the partnership serves the School of Architecture’s commitment to promoting an architecture that serves the public good, said Deborah Berke, dean of the Yale School of Architecture.
“We educate future leaders in architecture and design and, through our curriculum and community, strive to shape a more just, sustainable, and beautiful built environment,” said Berke, the J.M. Hoppin Professor of Architecture. “So, as we mark the second year of this great collaboration through the Jim Vlock First Year Building Project and the construction of a second home for New Haven’s early childhood educators, I am thankful that our students have the opportunity to work in support of our community and in the design and support of an innovative model for housing that I hope will have a wide influence.”
The single-story house is nestled into the surrounding landscape. Its “green” roof is covered by native plants.
An invaluable experience
The Vlock Building Project was established in 1967 to address students’ desire to pursue architecture committed to social action. In its early years, students traveled to sites in Appalachia to build community centers and medical facilities. Since 1989, the project has focused on building affordable housing in New Haven, with first-year students designing and building more than 50 homes in Yale’s host city.
As architecture students, we’re used to working behind a computer or with pen and paper. We can forget that what we draw has real-world implications.
This year, the students were asked to create a single-family house with living space for two educators (one single and the other with a dependent) that blended into the landscape, said Adam Hopfner, a senior critic at the school and director of the building project.
“The intention of this building was to try to achieve a level of quietness and stillness and make it feel of the site,” said Hopfner, the founder of Hopfner Studio, a New Haven-based design-build practice. “The design scheme had to reconcile with a very challenging site, which sits entirely on ledge. The grade was four feet lower when we started than it is now. I’m very proud of the students and their efforts in bringing their design idea to fruition.”
The house stands in a wooded area behind the dwelling the building project completed last year.
To start, the first-year students were divided into teams that each produced design proposal, which they eventually presented to the client and the city. After a single design scheme was selected, that student team produced a set of construction plans and broke ground in mid-May. All the first-year students contributed to the build through the end of June. Then, over the summer, a group of 12 students stayed on as paid interns to complete construction.
“The experience was very enlightening and informative,” said Jon Carlo Ardila, a student who worked on the project from start to finish. “As architecture students, we’re used to working behind a computer or with pen and paper. We can forget that what we draw has real-world implications. We draw a wall, but don’t necessarily think about the systems, like insulation and wiring, that are integrated inside it. Having that onsite experience was invaluable.”
The site is zoned by the city for single-family homes, so the design had to provide the residents with sufficient privacy and shared spaces, such as a single kitchen.
The home’s shared kitchen is brightened by a skylight over the island and large windows behind the dual sinks and leading to a wraparound porch at the back of the house.
The house’s front entrance opens into a spacious kitchen and common area. Sunlight brightens the room from a skylight located above a kitchen island. A large window offers a view of the stone ledge in front of the house. There are two sinks and two refrigerators. Sliding glass doors open onto a narrow porch that extends along the entire backside.
Doorways on either side of the common area lead into the separate living spaces. One consists of a bedroom and living room with a bathroom. The other has two bedrooms and a living room and bathroom. Pocket doors allow the residents to close off their individual units from the shared space.
While the house is designed to meet residents’ practical needs, it also features some creative flourishes. A column supporting the roof above the porch is made from the trunk of a beech tree that once stood on the site. Instead of discarding the tree — which had succumbed to a blight that is killing beech trees throughout the northeast — the students incorporated its trunk into their design. Viewed from a window in the living room of the two-bedroom unit, the column blends in with a copse of beech trees next to the house.
As the project evolved and challenges were met, all the students collaborated on the design, said Ardila, who was a member of the team that developed the initially approved design scheme.
“In the end, we all have ownership of the final design,” he said.
Supporting social change
Eric Gil, an educator at the Friends Center for Children’s location on East Grand Avenue — a brief walk from the housing site — will live in the two-bedroom space with his brother.
“The students have built a beautiful home,” Gil said. “I’m impressed by their talent and the thoughtfulness and care they put into the project.”
Eric Gil
Gil joins a burgeoning community of educators residing on the property. Aside from the two families living in the two-story house completed by Yale students last year, two other families reside in a brick house that already stood on the property when the Friends Center acquired it. The Building Project will design and build two additional dwellings, creating a community of up to 10 educators close to the center. The five homes will share a common green space, which is taking shape in the area just behind the new house’s back porch.
That sense of community is important, Gil said.
“I wanted to be an educator because of the significant impact that teachers have had on my life,” he said. “Being here at Friends Center makes me even more certain that I’ve made the right choice. And what I know now is that working at Friends Center is more than just a job; it is a community that helps you grow on a personal level.”
For his part, Ardila says he and his fellow students learned more from the project than construction techniques and how to best serve a client.
“More than anything, it was great to learn that we as architects can help to enact social change at the local level and help educators, who are so undervalued by society,” he said. “We all invested a lot in this project because it is a very important cause to us.”
