School of architecture

School Notes: School of Architecture
November/December 2015

New Haven home is latest first-year building project

On October 5, the School of Architecture dedicated this year’s Jim Vlock First-Year Building Project house, a 1,200-square-foot residence on a corner lot in New Haven’s West River neighborhood. Unique among architecture schools, YSoA requires its beginning students to design and then construct a building, enabling them to get firsthand experience of the building process from conception to the completion of a structure as they embark on their architectural careers.

The Building Project was first launched in 1967 with projects in Appalachia but has focused recently on creating homes in New Haven’s economically distressed and transitional neighborhoods. For the second consecutive year, the SoA has partnered with NeighborWorks New Horizons, an organization dedicated to developing quality affordable housing. This year, students were challenged to develop a cost-efficient and flexible design prototype that could be adapted to similar sites in New Haven and urban environments across the country. The students worked individually, and then in teams, to develop a plan for the dwelling. At the end of the semester, one project was chosen and the entire class worked over the summer to build the winning design.

A century of architecture education

An exhibition at the School of Architecture gallery marking a century of architecture education at Yale will explore the relationship between the physical setting of architecture education and how architecture is taught. Pedagogy and Place: Celebrating 100 years of Architecture Education at Yale presents the development of Yale’s program over the past century through a selection of representative alumni work, set against a background documenting the succession of buildings designed to house the school. A complementary installation depicting more than 20 other architecture schools and their buildings from around the world further illuminates the relationships between the spaces where training occurs and the modes that training has taken over the last two centuries. Pedagogy and Place is on view from December 3 through May 7. Next spring, the Yale Press will publish a history of the school by the exhibition’s curators, Dean Robert A. M. Stern ’65MArch and Jimmy Stamp ’11MEnvD.

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