Yestermorrow Design/Build School

Mission/Purpose:

The Fall Semester in Sustainable Design/Build at Yestermorrow will immerse up to 16 students in the hands-on collaborative process of designing and building an architecturally innovative high performance building. Under the guidance of Yestermorrow’s expert faculty, students explore the theory of sustainable design and acquire and apply the technical skills required to turn a carefully considered design into a successful structure.

The semester’s interdisciplinary and experiential curriculum will cover topics from aesthetics, to ecology, to affordability. Students live and work near the vibrant Yestermorrow campus and community in the scenic Mad River Valley, home to a rich legacy of architectural experimentation, sustainable enterprise development, and progressive environmental initiatives. The semester program offers highly motivated undergraduates an opportunity to learn and define what sustainability really means and looks like in practice.

Why It's Unique:

Unique among accredited design/build programs, the Yestermorrow semester offers admission to highly motivated and academically strong undergraduates from any major at any accredited degree-granting institution of higher education. Furthermore, the project scope is a single semester (whereas most design/build programs take two semesters or even a full year), in order to provide undergraduates with a challenging, rewarding and self-contained 16-week experience that fits seamlessly into most  home institutions’ academic calendars. Beyond accessibility, there are few programs, if any, that are able to combine the emphasis of a truly hands-on experience and keep within the sustainable building model practice, and probably none that having been doing it as long as Yestermorrow.   The semester is based in Vermont’s scenic Mad River Valley - an epicenter of the nascent design/build movement of the 1960s and 70s, home to many artisans and entrepreneurs, and a locus for innovative initiatives to revitalize local economies and food networks and promote sustainable energy use.

History of Design/Build in Vermont:

The history of Yestermorrow is rooted in design/build. In fact, the history of the contemporary design/build culture itself finds its roots in central Vermont--as early as 1964 when, while skiing at Sugarbush in the Mad River Valley, some friends from the Yale School of Architecture conceived of a plan to become developers, designers, and builders. Two of those friends, David Sellers and Peter Gluck, would become well known for doing just that. What started as an initial goal of saving time and money in an integrated design/build method, a model that they would carry through the rest of their work, would ultimately influence and create generations of design/builders. Sellers and his friend William Reinke purchased a piece of land in the Valley that became infamous among this crowd of renegade ivy-league architecture school dropouts, as Prickly Mountain. This area was a mecca for young design students who longed to move beyond the paper architecture of academic studios and to actually test their ideas against reality. Vermont, being a state that is distinctly more relaxed in its residential building codes, was the perfect incubator for this movement. John Connell moved to Warren to work for Sellers and founded Yestermorrow in 1980 as a place for architects, homeowners, architecture students, and builders to learn the design/build process.