The tenant of a newly built residence on a woodsy ridgeline in New Haven’s Fair Haven Heights neighborhood will sleep in the treetops. A picture window in the bedroom offers views, through crisscrossing branches, of the city’s skyline.
The elegant three-story abode, designed and built by first-year students at the Yale School of Architecture, will also allow the tenant to live rent free. Specifically, the project will become the home of an educator at Friends Center for Children, an organization that provides affordable early-childhood care and education in New Haven.
It is the latest accomplishment of the Jim Vlock First Year Building Project, a core element of the curriculum in the school’s professional architecture degree program, which offers students the opportunity to design and build an affordable home within the city. It is the 59th structure designed and built for the greater good of the community since the Building Project’s inception in 1967.
The new building is the latest addition to a five-house “village” being created through a partnership between Yale and the Friends Center. Each of the homes are being built on a two-acre parcel to house members of the center’s staff 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.
Providing educators free housing raises their effective pay by $23,000 on average, said Allyx Schiavone, executive director of Friends Center for Children.
“The most powerful impact isn’t in the math, it’s in the dignity,” Schiavone said, speaking at a recent open house for the new building. “Because paying people to live in poverty isn’t just about scarcity, it’s about shame and shame isolates… As a society, we heap shame on early educators by underpaying them, undervaluing them, and signaling through policy and systems and funding that their work doesn’t matter.
“This initiative says something different,” she said. “It says your work matters. Your contribution is essential.”
Allyx Schiavone, at right
Deborah Berke, the Edward P. Bass Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, sees supporting early childhood educators as an opportunity to train architects to apply their skills for the benefit of others. “I believe what motivates architects is to do good, and our tool for doing good, is to build buildings that help improve people’s lives,” she said.
I believe what motivates architects is to do good, and our tool for doing good, is to build buildings that help improve people’s lives.
The new structure is the third residence built on the site as part of the Vlock Project. Last year, students built a single-story house with living space for two educators (one single and the other with a dependent) designed to blend into the landscape. Before that, students created a two-story, street-facing house for two educators with young children.
These three student-built homes join an existing house to form the village. Next year, architecture students will design and build the site’s fifth and final dwelling.
The latest building is actually a three-story rectangular “cube.” Its ground floor is a community space where residents of the village can gather for yoga sessions, book clubs, children’s art workshops, or other events. Two sides are enclosed by glass, and after sundown the light from inside creates a warm, inviting glow. (The architecture students dubbed the building “the lantern” in homage to the Friends Center’s Quaker values, which hold that God’s light provides all spiritual guidance and illumination.)
The community space and the two-floor, one-bedroom apartment above it have separate entrances. Corten steel cladding around the apartment’s ground-floor entrance will naturally rust into shades of reds and browns, matching the building’s earthy surroundings. The top two floors are clad in pine timbers thermally modified to be weatherproof.
The apartment’s first floor (the building’s second floor) features a spacious kitchen. Due to the site’s steep grading, the kitchen has glass doors that open onto a small deck and the village’s grounds. A staircase leads to the third-floor bedroom in the tree canopy.
“It’s a nice perch,” said Adam Hopfner, a senior critic at the school and director of the building project.
The students, most of whom had never designed a building or performed construction work, contended with a tight footprint on a site that is a former sandstone quarry where building space is constrained by rock ledge, Hopfner said.
Yet, they managed to create a design scheme and construct a building for a third of what it would usually cost and in half the time, he said.
“I’m incredibly proud of the students’ work,” he said. “Their optimism and enthusiasm are inspiring.”
It’s rare to get to work on something that feels so personal.
Porter Windell, one of the students who designed and built the dwelling, said the experience instilled invaluable lessons in design and construction.
“In design, the big lesson was to look to make subtle moves that have a big impact,” he said, referencing the community space’s glass walls. “You start to understand that every decision has a consequence, and you need to weigh them together.”
The Friends Center’s mission to ease the financial burdens on early childhood educators was inspiring, Windell said.
“Getting work with these clients, people who are trying to do something for the greater good, became deeply personal for the students,” he said. “It’s rare to get to work on something that feels so personal.”
