 | School of Architecture students in the early stages of constructing a house designed as part of the school's annual First Year Building Project. |
If first-year students at the School of Architecture have it right, the open "loft style" floor plan -- with kitchen and living areas flowing together -- which has dominated home design for decades, may be on the way out.
The students used a distinctly different plan in the winning entry for this year's First Year Building Project , which for over 35 years has given architects-in-training a chance to construct buildings of their own design for the benefit of the public.
The rules of the competition have changed little over the years: First individually and later in teams, members of the first year class -- typically 40 to 45 -- vie to create the best design for a single-family, three-bedroom, 1,500-square foot house for a specific site.
Because of the innovative ideas the students incorporate into their designs, the competition has also become a testing ground for new concepts of residential space.
In the early years of the program, students provided community projects at various locales outside of New Haven, but since 1989 their efforts have been concentrated closer to home, in distressed residential neighborhoods of the city. With the non-profit organization Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS) providing core funding and many suppliers offering their products for free, the student builders construct the house on a restricted budget to offer at cost to the client chosen by NHS.
In selecting the winning design, faculty judges look for such features as the elegance with which it addresses particular challenges of the site, how it relates to the rest of the neighborhood and how it suits the needs of the future owners.
Last year's project, built on a corner lot, has a barn-red clapboard façade with a sloping shed roof. While it is unmistakably contemporary, its color and metal roof are designed to evoke the iconic farm buildings of rural New England. The open deck facing the street, sheltered by the extended roof, serves as a front porch for summer evening get-togethers.
This year's project, which student builders will complete by the fall, offers a few striking differences from its next-door neighbor. Most notable is a two-story rectangular section that juts out from the center of one side. On the other side, the center section is recessed, with stairs leading to a side entrance. This "is likely to be used more often on a daily basis than the street front, formal entrance," writes Sal Wilson, a spokesperson for the student designers, in a description of the project.
This extension actually is the "core" of the house, according to Forth Bagley, a leader of the student construction team.
This is where all the "services" -- e.g., plumbing and utility ducts -- are concentrated, Bagley explains. More significantly, he notes, it is the site of the kitchen.
Flanked on either side by front and back rooms, the kitchen, in a departure from floor plans past, clearly divides the ground floor into three distinct spaces. Along one wall, the kitchen shares a counter top with the back room, which the designers expect will be used as a dining room and informal gathering space, since it leads to a porch that overlooks a spacious backyard -- although the designers stress that its function is by no means predetermined.
A staircase joining the two stories separates the other ,side of the kitchen from a front room. This space can be used for any purpose -- family room, playroom, living room, study or gym -- whatever the predilection of the owners, note the student designers.
While a separate kitchen departs from any of the designs proposed by first-year students of at least the last decade, it is not uncommon among modest single family homes being constructed today, says Maria Tocci, a spokesperson for the IKEA furniture retailer in Elizabeth, New Jersey, which has donated more than $7,000 worth of goods to the project. Tocci speculates that people might be returning to more formal notions of the dining experience, separating the preparation of food from the eating.
Yale's design team sees the ground-floor counterrevolution as "a shift towards rethinking defined spaces ... to cover the varying functional needs of a small family," says Wilson. She notes that the intention in creating clearly delineated spaces of no specified purpose was to give the owners rooms to fill using their own imagination.
-- By Dorie Baker
T H I S
Students' winning house design parts with tradition
This year's lot is next to the home built last year in the West River section of New Haven. The properties are on a quiet residential street with modest clapboard-sided homes of early 20th-century vintage.
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