Built to Last
54 Adeline Street had been an abandoned corner for several years. Overgrown foliage spilled over the fence onto the sidewalk. An adjacent concrete stretch, dotted by miscellaneous cars, visually compounded the emptiness. The vacant lot always stood out amongst the clapboard houses that line Adeline Street for several blocks in both directions. For the past month, however, 54 Adeline has attracted attention for a different reason.
A house now stands on the once unoccupied space. The new addition is strikingly modern: it’s an A-frame featuring cream white wooden panels, a sleek, galvanized aluminum roof, and several large bay windows that extend outward to form a nook. The house lacks a traditional front door. Instead, because the building is actually comprised of two adjoining units, a breezeway marks the entrances.
The property is much more than an eye-catching structure. It’s the work of graduate students from the Yale School of Architecture, who participated in the annual Jim Vlock First Year Building Project. The program, mandatory for all first-year architecture students, results in the construction of a new house in an economically depressed neighborhood. The 2017 Vlock project is a first, however, because it represents the beginning of a multi-year partnership between the School of Architecture and Columbus House, a local organization that provides shelter and housing to community members struggling with homelessness. The 54 Adeline house will one day give a homeless family a place of their own, and was specifically designed for that purpose. While one family’s experience with homelessness will come to a close, the collaborative work between Columbus House and the Building Project is just getting started.
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“The history of the project goes back to before you and I were born,” said Adam Hopfner, ARC ’99, the director of the Building Project.
Charles W. Moore, who became head of the School of Architecture in 1965, founded the First Year Building Project in 1967. As an architect, Moore was particularly interested in the notion of inclusivity, and the idea that architecture could serve the greater good of society. The passion that students felt during the Civil Rights and antiwar movements augmented this mindset, creating an eagerness to leave the confines of their ivory tower and engage with larger social issues.
The Building Project, named for a 2007 endowment from the Vlock family honoring Charles Moore’s friend, Jim Vlock, has undergone various transformations over the decades. The earliest projects saw students designing and building houses and community centers in Appalachia. Then, following reduced budgets and logistical difficulties in the ’70s and ’80s, the focus shifted to local structures in the New Haven area, including bandstands and park pavilions. When Robert Stern became Dean of the School of Architecture in 1998, he pivoted the project’s attention to the issue of affordable housing. The Project began taking on partnerships with local nonprofit organizations that varied from year to year. Students would work with groups like Common Ground, Neighborhood Housing Services, and Habitat for Humanity, which acted as clients that identified individuals who could buy these houses at subsidized rates.
“That was great,” Deborah Berke, the current Dean of the School of Architecture, remarked. “They built some really wonderful houses around New Haven. But I felt when I started [at Yale], we had to address an even more compelling issue. I wanted to try to figure out how we as an architecture school could help those most at risk.” Connecticut saw a 13 percent decrease in homelessness this year from 2016. State officials have said ending chronic homelessness is simply a matter of improving the system for moving individuals to housing services. Thousands of New Haven residents still qualify as chronically homeless.
This new focus on homelessness reduction motivated Dean Berke, Director Hopfner, and Alan Organschi, the Studio Coordinator for the Building Project, to seek out a sustained relationship with a single community organization. 2017 is the first year of a five-year association with Columbus House, which supplies housing, veteran, income and employment services to people regardless of their criminal or substance abuse history.
Commitment to a local organization has solidified the Building Project’s focus on New Haven for the foreseeable future. Those at the School of Architecture argue that, far from being a limitation, this focus allows for rigorous engagement, a growing awareness of the ubiquity of homelessness, and a meaningful connection to the University’s surrounding communities.
“The issues that the homeless individuals can bring to the students, the intelligence with which they express these issues, and the respect that the students have for the design process as a collaborative effort has been incredibly rewarding for everybody involved,” Hopfner said.
Dean Berke echoes this sentiment. She explained that the five-year agreement is great for the students, the school, and the organization because it lets all parties learn from the current project and transfer knowledge to the next. The students from one Building Project class will have insightful commentary and experience for the following year’s class to absorb and implement into their own interactions and designs. As the School of Architecture and Columbus House continue to experiment, communicate, and innovate together, they compile institutional memory that will help inform future projects.
“There’s a tremendous need that exists in our home city and state,” Mr. Hopfner said. “New Haven has many issues that could benefit from the efforts and attention of the University. And there are incredible resources that the city has.”
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Development for the 54 Adeline house happened in various phases. The project’s student co-managers were elected in February. They oversaw the various groups that worked to get the site for the future building, communicated with local aldermen, sat in on necessary community meetings, and procured donations, ensuring everything was happening on schedule. Then in March, the first-year architecture students were broken up into six teams. Each team was given six weeks to design a scheme for the house. One design was chosen from the entrants and then the entire class came back together to further improve upon that design.
In devising their designs, students had to consider a few factors. Typical questions of utility, aesthetics, spatial constraints, and neighborhood attributes were taken into account, but the house’s specific purpose of housing two separate groups of homeless individuals added another dimension to this process. Not only did the students have to determine how best to incorporate two units into one cohesive structure, but they also needed to be certain that the house’s design reflected the desires of those who would one day inhabit it.
Daniel Whitcombe, ARC ’20, one of the project co-managers, recounted the students’ visit to a Columbus House facility. They spoke to individuals who faced the challenges of homelessness, and through this dialogue got a glimpse into these people’s histories, fears, and aspirations. In order to design a house that could feel like a home, the architects had to let these narratives inform their decisions. Translating these priorities into architectural choices was a consequential task. The shape of a wall, the height of a ceiling, the color and quality of the paint, the size of a window, all these details communicate an assortment of ideas and values that we as inhabitants digest and we as neighbors observe.
Whitcombe described how his team’s design scheme gave the 54 Adeline house a traditional, pitched roof with a variation on one side that extends it, creating an overhang. One façade has a perfect pitch, while the other distorts itself. The projected roof produces a covered space that divides the house’s interior and exterior.
“You can clearly see from the exterior two separate units, but all under one roof,” said Kerry Garickes, ARC ’20, the other project co-manager. “I think it’s really nice with this scheme how it gave each unit its own idea of space that was unique. That’s really important for people who haven’t had their own space coming into this.”
Whitcombe explained one of the important decisions teams had to make: whether or not they wanted to design a closed housing system. 54 Adeline Street is down the block from the Columbus House Valentine Macri site, a compound of 17 affordable housing units. The facility is walled off and under watch, separating it from the rest of the neighborhood.
“We decided to invert to the Valentine Macri scheme,” said Whitcombe. “We wanted to generate a sense of individual ownership and safety, but also make the house feel like it was open to the larger community.”
Whitcombe, Garickes, and all the other first-year students also attended several workshops. They spoke to Alison Cunningham, CEO of Columbus House, about the various effects of homelessness, and to another chief officer about the operation of homeless shelters. These complemented the other weekly workshops they had, which covered topics ranging from prefabrication to business operations.
“We really wanted folks to understand the scope of homelessness,” Cunningham said. “How many people are homeless. What our response has been as an agency. What the response of the state has been in terms of housing development.”
Columbus House’s usual building projects take much longer than eight months to complete. The preliminary stage alone can take more than a year. Columbus House has to organize the architecture and planning teams. Those professionals need to spend time coming up with the design as well as doing cost projections — there’s usually little to no money up front. Columbus House sometimes has to work with the state to gain access to the property they want to develop. There are necessary environmental and structural studies, especially if the existing structure is older. There may be an application process for the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority, which uses a points-based system to determine the degree of funding allocation. Racking up points can mean numerous revisions to a building’s design. Still, there’s great value in these projects, Cunningham reiterated. The workshops repeatedly drove this point home to the architecture students. In spite of all the bureaucracy and uncertainty Columbus House navigates, the resolve to better the life situation of others provided an orienting force that put their work in perspective.
“Working with the students has been such a joy and very exciting,” she said. “I found their interest in homelessness and their commitment to digging into that issue to be very important to the project. And the house itself is extraordinary.”
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The 54 Adeline house’s two units, a family unit and single bedroom “efficiency” unit, are not yet occupied; Columbus House still needs to select the future residents. When they do arrive, they will have a place to call their own. Case managers and security will be at the nearby Valentine Macri site to facilitate a smooth transition for the residents and promote general neighborhood safety.
The neighborhood reception has been warm. Whitcombe recollected feeling welcomed by the community as he and others spent time moving prefabricated modules from West Campus to the Hill and building on-site. He said the relationship between Yale students and the people they were working for felt very reciprocal. “People would just come by the site and be like, ‘Oh, great job,’” Garickes added. “They’d say hello. One time, a family came by with their kid and he got a little tour around the house. There was a lot of good energy from the neighbors.”
Continuing the late Dean Moore’s legacy, today’s Building Project has provided both practical experience and socially responsible interaction with one of the most pervasive social challenges in New Haven. The five-year partnership is off to a good start and all parties involved are excited about what the next four years can bring. Above all else, more families in New Haven will have roofs over their heads.
