OREANDA-NEWS. September 23, 2016. A new home, designed and built by Yale students as part of the Jim Vlock First Year Building Project, will be dedicated at a ceremony on Monday, Sept. 26.

The reception will take place at the new house, located at 196 Winthrop Ave., from 5:30 to 7 p.m. The event is open to the public free of charge.

For the third consecutive year, the Yale School of Architecture (YSoA) partnered with NeighborWorks New Horizons, an organization dedicated to developing quality affordable housing.

Established in 1967, the Jim Vlock First Year Building Project is a required component of Yale’s curriculum that gives first-year students at the YSoA the opportunity to work collaboratively to design and build a structure as part of their graduate education. The building project has in recent years focused on the design and construction of houses in New Haven’s economically distressed neighborhoods.

This year’s project focused on creating a 1,000-square-foot two family house to be located on a narrow sliver lot in New Haven’s West River neighborhood. Students were challenged to develop a cost-efficient and flexible design that addresses the unique challenges facing similar sliver sites in New Haven and other urban environments across the country.

During the first half of the spring semester, students worked individually, each developing a prototype for the dwelling. Eight of these initial schemes were selected for further development, and the class was divided into teams, each tasked with creating a final design proposal. At the end of the semester, one project was chosen and the entire class worked together to build the selected design.

Jim Vlock Building Project homes from recent years can be found at 193 Winthrop Ave. (2015), 179 Scranton St. (2014), 118 Greenwood St. (2013), and 132-136 Newhall St. (2012).