3 Houses, 3 Years Jim Vlock First Year Building Project

The putative goals of a Jim Vlock design-build project focus on the nexus of physical resistance and logistical difficulty posed by the "realities" of construction. The concerns that drive our current educational cost-benefit analysis parallel what the readers hear from neighbors in the New Haven community as they watch our students hard at work each year and wonder at the narrowness of the objective for so much investment. The readers learn a poignant lesson about design agency that our students can bring to their future work as teachers, policy-makers, construction managers, developers, and professional practitioners: that the design in design-build is everywhere. The readers study the building envelope as a technology — a series of constituent technical layers with specific roles in providing comfort, shelter, air flow, resistance to gravity, and wind and earthquakes — and also as a mediator between the close, intimate space of the room and the sometimes unfamiliar or even abject conditions of an urban environment.