This past winter, Samee Guddanti, a first-year student at the Yale School of Architecture, worked closely with four of her peers on a design proposal for a two-family house on a shady hillside in the New Haven neighborhood of Fair Haven Heights. They met nearly every day, sometimes having to trudge through snow to reach the studio at Rudolph Hall.
Their efforts were part of the Jim Vlock First Year Building Project; a core component of the school's professional architecture degree program, the annual project offers students the opportunity to design and build an affordable home within the city. At the start, all first-year students were split into teams to develop design schemes for this year's project: a home that will ease financial burdens for two local early childhood educators and their families. One team's proposal would be selected for construction.
Guddanti and her teammates - Yuenji Nam, Gabrielle Newman, Juan Ledezma, and Fernando Rojas Cervantes - devoted long hours to their design, which they called "The Nest," often staying late into the night after consulting with their instructors.
"Two or three of us would often start by gathering around the table to share ideas, sketches, and thoughts, and we gradually developed a strong collaborative rhythm where one person might begin an idea, and another could seamlessly build upon it," Guddanti said. "We really played into each other's strengths and came together as a very dynamic team."
