2024 Jim Vlock First Year Building Project
This year’s Jim Vlock First Year Building Project, a two-family dwelling in New Haven’s Fair Haven Heights neighborhood, was celebrated at an open house on September 30, 2024. Statements by Dean Deborah Berke and Allyx Schiavone, director of Friends Center for Children, opened the evening’s festivities, and Maurie McInnis’s speech marked one of her first public engagements since the beginning of her tenure as Yale president.
The home’s future tenants, educators Eric Gil and Justin Cross, along with Gil’s younger brother, also took the stage. YSoA students and faculty members, Friends Center staff, and community members were invited to tour the home. The singlestory home is the second built in collaboration with client Friends Center for Children, a New Haven–based early childhood education provider. This partnership allows the center to experiment with a new approach to the crisis in care—childcare costs too much while educators make too little to survive—by aiming to provide housing for 30 percent of its teachers by 2028, thereby supplementing their salaries with rent-free housing.
The single-story home, kept low to preserve the neighbors’ views over New Haven, stretches 72 feet parallel to grade, with a main entry at the level of the driveway to the east and a full-length porch on the western facade. A common kitchen and dining room opens directly off the main entry to be shared by all tenants, while separate bedrooms and living rooms occupy the north and south sides of the home. The house hugs the ground beneath a forest canopy of majestic maples and oaks; three large skylights open upward in bathrooms and the kitchen to ensure adequate natural lighting.
The low profile of the house enables the use of a green roof, further blending the structure with its surroundings. Around the exterior of the house, COR-TEN steel cladding adopts a deep rust color that echoes the hues of local soil. The porch soffits are clad in locally sourced white oak slats, and the thermally treated decking is by Cambium Carbon. At the corner where the porch connects with the side yard, a meandering tree trunk harvested on-site serves as a lone column.
This year new materials were used, including wood-fiber insulation by Timber HP and Glavel foam glass gravel sub-slab insulation, both more sustainable than foam. In addition to the green roof, plantings of magnolia, dogwood, holly, rhododendron, and hydrangea from Summer Hill Nursery surround the house.
With the beginning of the Spring semester a new class of MArch I students start designing what will be the third house in collaboration with Friends Center, destined for a site on the Howard Avenue campus near the home just completed.
