This past winter, Samee Guddanti, a first-year student at the Yale School of Architecture, worked closely with four of her peers on a design proposal for a two-family house on a shady hillside in the New Haven neighborhood of Fair Haven Heights. They met nearly every day, sometimes having to trudge through snow to reach the studio at Rudolph Hall.
Their efforts were part of the Jim Vlock First Year Building Project; a core component of the school’s professional architecture degree program, the annual project offers students the opportunity to design and build an affordable home within the city. At the start, all first-year students were split into teams to develop design schemes for this year’s project: a home that will ease financial burdens for two local early childhood educators and their families. One team’s proposal would be selected for construction.
Guddanti and her teammates — Yuenji Nam, Gabrielle Newman, Juan Ledezma, and Fernando Rojas Cervantes — devoted long hours to their design, which they called “The Nest,” often staying late into the night after consulting with their instructors.
“Two or three of us would often start by gathering around the table to share ideas, sketches, and thoughts, and we gradually developed a strong collaborative rhythm where one person might begin an idea, and another could seamlessly build upon it,” Guddanti said. “We really played into each other’s strengths and came together as a very dynamic team.”
A model of “The Nest.”
The results suggest as much. Friends Center for Children, an organization that provides affordable early-childhood care and education in New Haven, recently chose The Nest from a field of strong options as the design that will take shape on Fair Haven Heights.
It will be the 60th structure designed and built by first-year architecture students to benefit the local community since the Building Project’s inception in 1967.
Guddanti looks forward to working with all her classmates to translate the design scheme into an elegant and cozy home for two of the center’s teachers and their families.
One of the most rewarding parts of the Jim Vlock Building Project is seeing your design come to life and witnessing the immediate impact it has on the community.
“One of the most rewarding parts of the Jim Vlock Building Project is seeing your design come to life and witnessing the immediate impact it has on the community,” she said. “I look forward to learning about the process of putting together a building from the ground up and working with my friends on site.”
The new dwelling will complete a five-house “village” that has emerged on a 2-acre parcel in Fair Haven Heights through a multi-year partnership between the Vlock Building Project and the Friends Center. The village, which houses members of the center’s staff and their children or other dependents, is part of its 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.
The Nest will sit at the back of the site, closing off a common outdoor space shared by the village’s residents. Once complete, the village will be composed of four homes built by the Vlock Building Project and one that previously stood on the property.
As its name suggests, The Nest is designed to “nestle” into the landscape underneath a canopy of trees.
“We were careful to respect the surrounding trees, the history of the site as a former quarry, and the strict setbacks and property lines,” Guddanti said. “One of the strengths of the design is how it follows the natural slope of the land, stepping with the terrain and requiring very little grading. This approach allows the building to sit lightly on the site while preserving the character of the existing landscape.”
All the student groups presented their design proposals during a final review at the Yale School of Architecture.
At the start of the design process, the Friends Center asked the students to make sure their schemes accounted for the residents’ privacy, said Newman.
“From this, our team started using a vocabulary consisting of ‘nested,’ ‘nestled,’ and ‘cozy,’” she said. “The through-line has been the notion of nestling, where we aim to strike a balance between privacy and openness in each of the different types of space: private, living, and outdoor.”
The house’s residents will share a spacious kitchen and dining area but have separate living spaces and bedrooms on the ground and second floors, respectively. Each will enjoy private outdoor space. The ground floor will feature a terrace, and the second will have a rooftop garden, according to the scheme.
“The design allows residents to gather and share moments together when they choose, while also providing each family with comfortable, distinct spaces of their own,” Guddanti said.
The students were intentional about every aspect of the design, including positioning the windows to maximize privacy while allowing the residents to enjoy views of the village’s commons and surrounding woods, she said.
The through-line [of the project] has been the notion of nestling, where we aim to strike a balance between privacy and openness in each of the different types of space: private, living, and outdoor.
The team succeeded in achieving this careful balancing of privacy and access to nature, said Adam Hopfner, a senior critic at the school and director of the Building Project.
“The selected scheme gives identity to both of the units, offering each family direct access to private outdoor space,” Hopfner said. “It also sensitively engaged the site’s challenging topography as it deftly completes the ‘village’ by offering a subtle edge to the commons.”
In the project’s next phase, all the first-year students will work together to break the design into construction plans. In May, the students will trade design software for hardhats and power tools and start construction. Then, through the summer, a smaller team of students will stay on as paid fellows to complete construction. A dedication ceremony and celebration will be held with The Friends Center in the fall.
“We’ll flesh out the technical details — the nuts and bolts of it all — with our cohort at large,” Newman said. “It’s intended to be a grounding experience… While we’ll surely be humbled by physical realities, by the end of construction we’ll all be able to look back on this technical phase and see how every person in the cohort contributed to making this project real.”
