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Basic Building
One of the major monuments to the late Architecture School dean Charles Moore is the “First-Year Building Project,” a hands-on design experience that is becoming a model for architectural education.
Summer 1994
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
Mark Alden Branch ’86 is a senior editor of Progressive Architecture magazine.
Sharon James, a New Haven bank teller and mother of two boys, was new to the language of architectural criticism. But on a Monday afternoon in April, as Yale architecture faculty members and representatives of Habitat for Humanity discussed the merits of four house designs proposed by teams of first-year students, she was more than casually interested. For the 12-person jury was deciding which of the four designs would be her new home.
James is soon to be the owner of the fifth New Haven house designed and built by students at the Yale School of Architecture in cooperation with Habitat for Humanity, the Georgia-based nonprofit house-building organization. The houses are the most recent products of the school’s First-Year Building Project, a program founded nearly 30 years ago by Charles W. Moore while he was dean of the school. Moore died last winter of a heart attack at the age of 68, and the program has since been renamed in his memory.
This program, unlike any other in the country, allows every student to take part in the design and construction of a real building during the spring term of the first year. It has survived several deanships and several changes in direction over the years—as well as numerous financial close calls—and is now seen as one of the School’s strongest selling points in the competition for students. The fact has not been lost on other architecture schools, several of which are beginning to consider comparable offerings.
Architectural education is traditionally based on design studios, in which students are given specific—what usually remain imaginary—assignments to design buildings. The students, working alone or occasionally in teams, produce drawings and models for review by faculty and outside critics. With most studios, that’s where the process ends. In Yale’s first-year project, however, students work individually at first, then combine into teams based on shared interests or approaches.
Through a series of reviews, the designs are narrowed to those of four teams, which present drawings, models, and cost estimates for their design at the final review, where a winning design is selected. A week later, students are on the site preparing to build. Most move on to summer jobs after six weeks’ work on the construction. But about eight students—paid from funds raised by students each year—stay through the entire summer to complete the job.
To appreciate just how special the first-year project is, some history is in order. For centuries, “master builders” were responsible for the design and construction of virtually all types of buildings—from cottages to cathedrals. As they built, they would adapt their designs in response to unanticipated conditions. The profession of architecture as it is known today is actually relatively young; some date it only to the founding of the American Institute of Architects in 1857, when architects organized as professionals for the first time. As part of this professionalization, architects drew a distinct line between the design and the construction of buildings. Architecture schools, for their part, were expected to reinforce that distinction. Even so, common sense would suggest that architecture students would benefit from learning firsthand what it’s like to implement their designs by actually sawing boards, hammering a few nails, and laying some bricks.
Common sense arrived at Yale in 1965 in the person of Charles Moore, a remarkable architect and teacher who became internationally famous for his challenge to the orthodoxy of Modern architecture and for his playful use of historic forms in his buildings. As chairman of the Department of Architecture (and later, after the Schools of Art and Architecture were separated, as dean), Moore conceived the first-year project along with faculty member Kent Bloomer. Now an adjunct professor in the school, Bloomer says the project arose in response to several student needs that Moore perceived.
“First, Moore was an inveterate traveler and a great believer in the importance of travel,” says Bloomer. “He also had an interest in basic technologies, and wanted students to be inspired by the mechanics of a building. And finally, there was at that time among the students an increasing alienation toward authority, along with an interest in social issues. The building project was a combination of those agendas.”
On the suggestion of a group of Yale students who had spent the summer building housing in eastern Kentucky, Moore selected a community center for New Zion, Kentucky, as the first project. He and Bloomer shepherded the students through the process of designing the building, and during the second half of the spring term the class drove to Kentucky to build it, which they did, from pouring the foundation to painting the trim. “The project today is more precisely organized, more prescriptive,” says Bloomer. “In those days, there was a great deal more amateurism in the project. The students had more of a tendency to figure things out as they went along.”
Subsequent projects included another community center in the town of Lower Grassy, Kentucky, a medical center in Cabin Creek, West Virginia, and a series of camp buildings closer to home in Connecticut. After Moore’s departure, and as budgets got tighter (Federal money had helped fund the early projects), the nature of the project changed. Because of increasing pressure on student schedules, the projects were confined to the New Haven area. The buildings became less ambitious programatically, too; from 1981 to 1987, students built covered pavilions for a number of local parks (including a summer concert stage for the New Haven Green).
The change in both program and location produced some substantial rewards. In 1970, Paul Brouard, a Yale-educated architect and builder, had been appointed to oversee the construction portion of the project. And six years later, New Haven architect Herbert S. Newman was hired to lead the design portion. Newman, who also has a Yale architecture degree, recalls that the pavilions, with fewer functional limitations, “did a great deal to help inform students about structure, joinery, and craft.” The era of the often fanciful pavilions culminated in an elaborate, crustacean-like bandshell for Seaside Park in Bridgeport in 1987.
While Newman runs the design studio and negotiates with clients and city officials, Brouard (who also teaches a materials course at the school in the fall), helps organize work crews and teaches them the fine points of construction. “Without Paul there is no building program; he is the glue that has held the thing together,” says Vermont architect John Connell, who worked on the West Virginia health center as a first-year student in 1975.
The current partnership with Habitat for Humanity began in 1989. Newman explains that “as the horrors of the city became more and more apparent to us, we wanted to get involved in the housing issue.” Brouard adds that he sensed in the students “a change in attitude about public service. They wanted to make a more direct contribution.”
Habitat uses donated funds, labor, and materials to build houses for what local director José-Luis Bedolla calls “the working poor.” Potential homeowners, selected through an application and interview process, must contribute 400 hours of work on Habitat sites as “sweat equity” in lieu of a down payment. Additional labor comes from volunteers, including church groups, interested individuals, and people in building trades. In New Haven, Habitat renovates housing in blighted neighborhoods instead of building new ones, except for the Yale houses, which are built on vacant inner-city lots typically acquired at little or no cost.
The first Habitat projects to be built were a pair of two-family houses in the depressed Hill neighborhood, near the Medical School; on Hallock Street in 1989; and on Rosette Street in 1990. When Habitat had trouble raising money for materials, Frederick P. Rose ’44E, a New York City developer, stepped in with a gift of $50,000. In 1991, money was again a problem, and the school teamed up with Home, Inc., a joint housing effort of the Law School and the School of Organization and Management, to build a two-family rental house on Blake Street.
In 1992, the organizers scaled the project down to a single-family house. In that year and in 1993, students built houses on nearby lots on Newhall Street, part of Habitat’s strategy of concentrating their efforts in a small area in order to maximize their impact. “We’ve tried to refurbish or build properties as close together as possible in order to build a neighborhood, rather than just building a house that will be an island,” says director Bedolla. “A lot of people have been painting and refurbishing as a result. It’s had a real positive influence.” Brouard agrees: “We saw a marked difference in the street environment of Newhall between the first year and the second. It was much more civil.”
Despite the undeniable benefits to both parties, the Yale-Habitat partnership has not always been a smooth one. While Habitat, with its volunteer labor force, tends to prefer the simplest, most conventional construction, the architecture students are partial to more inventive solutions. Last year’s house on Newhall Street illustrates the conflict. Because a perpendicular street comes to an end in front of the site, the winning designers placed the house farther back from the street than its neighbors and put the entrance on the side, presenting a rather sober face to Newhall Street. What the students—and the jurors—considered to be a thoughtful response to a difficult site, the community saw as “unfriendly,” in Kent Bloomer’s words.
“The students didn’t have a sense of these neighborhoods, and they didn’t have a sense of community reaction to what they might do,” says Brouard. Partially in response to such problems, he added a new element to the beginning of this year’s project. Before the students began designing, they did a “neighborhood study” to assess the impact of the past houses and get better acquainted with the people and institutions in the area where they were working.
Inspired by the social success of the Habitat houses, Brouard and Fred Koetter, dean of the School of Architecture, are now planning a more extensive program—perhaps tied to President Clinton’s national service plan for youth—that would send a corps of students and graduates out to build
and rehabilitate housing in selected communities across the country. These teams, says Koetter, might also train high school students in the hope that they would be able to move on to jobs in the housing industry (two high school interns are already employed each summer on the Habitat job sites in New Haven).
But the building project remains, in the end, more a teaching tool than a vehicle for social change, and as such it has been consistently successful over the years. Mark Simon, a partner in Centerbrook Architects, an award-winning Essex, Connecticut, firm founded by Moore, designed and built a “play machine” at New Haven’s Camp Cedar Crest while he was a student in 1969. The project “demystified the building process” says Simon. “You develop a respect for construction that I don’t see you getting any other way.” Simon is leading an effort to raise a $500,000-endowment in Moore’s name to support the students who work on the project over the summer.
Perhaps more than any other alumnus of the program, John Connell took the lessons of the project to heart. A 1977 graduate of the architecture school, in 1980 he founded the Yestermorrow School in Warren, Vermont, a summer school where nonarchitects can gain design and construction skills. (Many architecture students from other schools come to Yestermorrow for the kind of experience Yale offers.) Connell says that recently there has been “a groundswell of interest from across the country” from schools wishing to set up programs like Yale’s. “The building project has been one of the major draws of the Yale School of Architecture,” says Connell.
Current students confirm Connell’s claim. Other schools offer two-year master of architecture degrees for students who already have a five-year bachelor of architecture, while a Yale master’s takes three years regardless of previous degrees. But second-year student Michael Levy says “it’s worth spending an extra year just to take the first-year course.” First-year student Joseph Smith, who was on this year’s winning team, says the building project showed him that the school “was interested in teaching me to be an architect.” Students and alumni also stress the camaraderie that develops among the class. “Whenever old alums get together, they tell war stories about their projects,” says Connell. “It’s a pretty strong bonding process.”
The final four designs that resulted from this year’s competition were, by all accounts, the most well-resolved in many years. After the presentations, the students retired to Naples Pizza while the jurors—six architecture faculty members and six Habitat representatives—tried to select a winner.
(They struggled for more than an hour to eliminate even one.) After more than two hours, they found themselves divided evenly between two schemes. That’s when someone said, “Let Sharon decide.”
While Sharon James, the future homeowner, had been consulted by the student teams in great depth about her wants and needs, it was unprecedented for the user to have a vote in the final selection. After James had received a detailed explanation of each of the two designs pinned to the walls, she returned to the center of the room. Everything grew quiet. James pointed to a model and said, “I like that one.” The jurors and onlookers burst into applause.
Later, James explained that she liked the fact that the winning scheme had discrete rooms, and that she admired the wraparound porch. Six days later, while her sons Jean-Claude and Frederick played on the site, she turned over a spadeful of earth to mark the official groundbreaking for her new home.  |
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