Pictured is a model of the winning design of the First Year Building Project. Architecture students will build the new house in the Hill neighborhood, which has views of Long Island Sound.

Architecture students rise to the task of making a home

For over three decades, first-year students at the School of Architecture have been learning the art of home building from the ground up, literally. The First Year Building Project, in which every first-year student must participate, challenges budding architects to design and build a site-specific single- or two-family home to sell at cost to a low-income buyer. Many students come to the School of Architecture because of the program. "The Yale Building Project is the first and only continuous such program," says School of Architecture Dean Robert A.M. Stern. "It is a unique way of combining the practical and the theoretical." Ever since it began in 1967, the program has given first-year students a chance to test themselves while also helping communities in need. In fact, the program was created as a means to social action as well as an opportunity for hands-on experience. Projects students undertook in the program's first decade included park pavilions, camp cabins, community centers and a dormitory for a chapter of the Boy Scouts. After 1989, when students joined forces with a local chapter of Habitat for Humanity, the annual project has been to design and build affordable housing in or around New Haven. Since 1995, core funding for the new construction has come from the nonprofit organization Neighborhood Housing Services, Inc., which operates on the principle that one new house can revitalize a whole neighborhood. Paul Brouard, who has directed the program since its inception, says the presence of a new single family house on a neglected street can kindle an interest in home ownership and renovation among neighboring residents. "The progression of home ownership is changing the character of neighborhoods where we built," Brouard says. "It is making them more stable." Brouard cites as examples of this residential renaissance two New Haven neighborhoods, Newhallville and West River, which each received three new homes through the First Year Building Project. The groundbreaking for the new house follows a contest among students to come up with the best design. Divided into three stages, the contest begins with the students' examining the chosen site within its local contexts: physical, architectural and human. "The first thing I did was interview people in the neighborhood," says Hanson Liu, a first-year student who had worked in the fields of biology and electronics before coming to the School of Architecture. After a week of brainstorming, students individually present their design proposals for review. They are then divided into nine teams of four to five members. Learning to work in teams is one of the benefits for the project, since students are used to tackling projects independently. "You get ideas you wouldn't get if you worked alone," Liu says of the experience. After a few weeks of creative strategic thinking, the nine teams meet for another competitive review, and four teams are chosen for the last round. During the third and final stage, the four teams, which have now incorporated all the other students in the class, make drawings, plans, models and construction details of their design for the best 1,500-square-foot house for the site that $70,000 will buy. That budget is exclusive of most labor, supplied free by the students themselves, and many of the building materials, which are donated by manufacturers. At the final review, before a jury made up of faculty members, visiting architects and representatives of Neighborhood Housing Services, as well as neighborhood residents who are invited to voice their concerns, the four teams defend their proposals. Excavation begins shortly after the design of the winning team is chosen. The site chosen for this year's project is at 33-35 Fifth St., a corner lot once occupied by an apartment building in the Hill-City Point neighborhood. "The challenges of the site were many," says architecture student Will Tims, a member of the winning design team. The lot was disproportionately large for a single-family house; it was located between a busy commercial avenue and a residential neighborhood; and there was a lot of noise from nearby I-95, he notes. "The site is advantageous as well," Tims continues, pointing out that the single-family house will be the first built in the neighborhood since it was bisected by the highway in the 1960s. "We saw this as an opportunity to break from the predominant Victorian typology of the neighborhood, and propose a new way of living," he says. Also in the plus column, he notes, is a distant view of Long Island Sound. "Our design was an attempt to address two landscapes, the vast landscape of the highway and the Sound, and also a newly created, introspective and private landscape of the backyard," Tims says. The upper-level of the house, with two bedrooms and a large living area connecting to an outdoor porch, takes advantage of the "outer" landscape, by affording a view of the water beyond the highway. The lower level, with a bedroom or study and kitchen and dining area, relates more to the backyard. Corridors and bathrooms have been strategically placed to insulate the bedrooms from the noise of traffic on the busy street in front of the house and from I-95. All the students of the first-year class will take up hammer and nails, chisel and saw to work on the house until the middle of June. Eight students, working as paid interns, will take the project then through the summer to the dedication of the finished house in September. -- By Dorie Baker T H I SW E E K ' SS T O R I E S New center supporting legal reform in China Team finds 'surprising ability' in bone marrow cells Notable speakers will highlight this year's Commencement Manipulating molecules through nanotechnology Developing lightweight batteries for field missions Summertime at Yale ENDOWED PROFESSORSHIPS James Dittes named Roger J. Squire Professor Dr. Robert Weiss appointed Guthrie Professor Devoted Yale alumnus and benefactor John J. Lee dies Noted legal scholar and humanist Charles L. Black Jr. dies Commencement Information MEDICAL NEWS Grants to support new clinical programs Study shows both black and white doctors refer fewer . . . 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