Building Project Update The 2022 Jim Vlock First Year Building Project debuted on October 2, 2022, at a reception attended by the Yale University president, Peter Salovey. The event also honored the legacy of Paul Brouard (MArch ’61), who led the Building Project for more than 40 years, with reminiscences from many former students and colleagues.
Students present at the Building Project final review on April 18, 2023. Photograph by Benjamin Piascik.
The 2022 two-bedroom accessory dwelling unit — located behind the 2019 project, on Plymouth Street — was the last in a six-year collaboration with Columbus House, a New Haven homelessness services provider. Perched just above the Metro North railroad tracks, the house provided challenges for student designers including how to insulate the living quarters from train noise and ensure privacy from the existing house while providing residents with open space. The 2023 project is the first in a series of collaborations between first-year MArch I students and a new client: Friends Center for Children, which provides early childhood care and education for children ages three months to five years. The center seeks to create a campus with housing for their educators. In May construction started on the first of four dwellings to be built on a forested two-acre lot in Fair Haven Heights. Brady Stone (MArch ’04) and Paul Freudenburg (MArch/MEM ’22) are joining the Building Project director, Adam Hopfner (MArch ’99), on-site for the first time.
The selected project is a two-story house designed with the client’s Quaker values in mind: “Peace is prioritized through the separation of private and public spaces, providing ample personal living areas for each family. Equity is ensured through equal proportion of space on both upper and lower levels, with diverse experiences for different lifestyles. Community is fostered through communal spaces, such as a generous kitchen and a light-filled foyer. Integrity is reflected in the design’s consideration of ease of construction, cost effectiveness, and sustainability with features like a green roof. Stewardship is maintained through careful attention to construction elements and safety for children. Simplicity is embraced in the overall design, by adopting a familiar form that blends into the surrounding landscape.” Each of the house’s two two-bedroom apartments has its own living room, but they share a common entrance, kitchen, dining room, laundry facility, and reading area. These shared spaces are oriented away from the street toward the center of what in future years will become the campus of the Friends Center for Children.
François Dallegret: Beyond the Bubble 2023 Team A final model for the 2023 Jim Vlock First Year Building Project. Photograph by Benjamin Piascik.
Students lift an interior wall into place. Photograph by Benjamin Piascik.
Pouring the foundation walls. Photograph by Benjamin Piascik.
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2022 Jim Vlock First Year Building Project. Photographs by Tom Hsu (MArch ’24) and Brandon Lim (MArch ’24).
Swag from Friends Center for Children distributed at the Building Project review. Photograph by Benjamin Piascik.
Much to François Dallegret’s credit, the passage of time makes it no easier to write about the artist’s work. He remains a vexing member of the mid-twentieth-century avant-garde, much like Paul Rudolph, designer of the bushhammered gallery where Dallegret’s work was on display this spring. Over the course of his career, Dallegret’s varied and prolific output attracted a variety of labels, which were slapped on, accumulated, and slowly slid off like weak fridge magnets. Contemporaries have labeled him variously as architect, designer, artist, car buff, jester, eccentric visionary, provocateur, bricoleur, entrepreneur, “half Piranesi, half Harpo Marx,” sanctimonious, profane. The list is infinite and always more than partially apt. Sifting through the vast detritus of Dallegret’s shifting selfpresentation on view throughout the gallery, one could find only three examples of a concrete, articulated self-description: “aesthetician,” “idealizer,” “GOD.” Words, however, were never Dallegret’s medium of choice. Admittedly not a man for writing, nor for reading or interviews, he nevertheless took immense pleasure in list making and in note taking, and crucially, in titling his own work. It is perhaps in his titles that we find the skeleton key to an understanding of his project, of a consistent disposition played out across time on both sides of the Atlantic. They jam together technical nomenclature and cheeky double entendre — for example, GOD, an acronym of “Go Dallegret”; the voluptuous curves of the ASS IS chair entreating viewers, in French, to sit; the CliclaCrocoTartoMatic, a machine for tripping, slapping, and/or pieing one’s interlocutors with lemon tart; R âpe à Fromage, an inhabitable cheese grater — each reminding us not to take it too seriously. In many art forms the most poignant, if only, line of poetry can be found in the work’s title. But with Dallegret these produce a taut ambiguity. If he was careful not to take himself too seriously, his work possesses the devoted self-seriousness of a good comedian. Is he joking or dead serious? Look as close as you like, but you’ll never find a crack in the facade.
Constructs
Working on the Fleurs des Vents proposal for Expo 67, Montreal, 1966.
With a bit of luck and online persistence, artist Justin Beal (BA ’01) stumbled upon an affordable and intact Kiik at an antique shop in Mexico City. Once commonly available at the MoMA gift shop, it has become a rare commodity. The small, polished stainlesssteel sculptural object that fits in the palm of the hand evades easy description. Dallegret enigmatically labeled it a “hand pill” for “breaking bad habits and starting good ones.” A celebratory post on social media drew an immediate and fortuitous response from artist Kara Hamilton (MFA ’99), who counted Dallegret as a family friend growing up in Toronto. Beal and Hamilton’s subsequent conversation catalyzed the idea for the exhibition, in essence a traveling redux of GOD & CO: Beyond the Bubble, curated by Thomas Weaver, Alessandra Ponte, and Laurent Stalder, at the Architectural Association, in London, in 2011. Over the next three years the show traveled to Zurich, Paris, and Hamilton, Ontario; nine years later Beal and Hamilton have “re-organized, amended, and adjusted” it for the Yale Architecture Gallery. In this iteration of the
