School Notes: School of Architecture
September/October 2009

Sustainability integral part of curriculum

The school has redesigned its curriculum over the past year with an eye toward more fully embedding environmental sustainability concepts into design, says associate professor Michelle Addington. "Our approach is to address sustainability at all levels and in all modes, from advanced research to directed studies to integration into the core curriculum for all architecture students." She says the school has begun placing greater emphasis on issues of sustainability in the core studios, adding to its long-standing daylighting workshop climate and environmental systems workshops. The climate and site analysis workshop has been expanded into a new course that is now required for all architecture students. "The workshops serve as a bridge between the content courses in technology and the studio," she adds. This approach, Addington says, is fundamentally different from past practice and from that of other schools that teach sustainability only in elective courses.

First-year building project

Students in this summer's Vlock First-Year Building Project constructed the second of three homes for returning female Iraq War veterans that will create a tiny community in a New Haven neighborhood. The house, to be finished in late September, is the 43rd building designed and constructed in as many years in what has been a signature project of the architecture school since it was inaugurated in 1967 by Charles Moore, then chairman of the department of architecture.

Adam Hopfner ’99MArch, a critic at the school, took over as project director three years ago and converted what had been an almost exclusively single-family build to a two-family project. The latest house has a 1,400-square-foot, three-bedroom owner's apartment on the first floor and a 600-square-foot, one-bedroom rental apartment upstairs. "That asymmetry forces students to deal with the spatial ramifications" of two disparate levels, he says, adding that building a trio of homes is an "interesting opportunity, not only to have a greater impact on the community but also . . . for the students to respond to the historic housing typology of New Haven as well as to their predecessors and colleagues" who built the first house. The City of New Haven has made the sites available, and the three houses are a joint project with the West Haven VA Hospital and with Common Ground Community, a New York City-based nonprofit that builds affordable housing for low-income and disabled individuals and families.

Film screening kicks off academic year

The new academic year gets under way with a screening of Luckey, a documentary about a School of Architecture graduate who suffered a traumatic spinal injury. Tom Luckey ’62, ’66BArch, had been a designer and builder of interactive art, specializing in large-scale climbable outdoor sculptures for children. But after an accident in 2006 left him a quadriplegic, he came to rely on the help of his son, Spencer ’04MArch, to implement his designs. Luckey recounts the aftermath of the accident and examines the family struggles that ensued from the resulting life changes. The film will be shown on the Sundance Channel in October.