Celebrating the Past and Planning for Yestermorrow’s Future

By Kate Stephenson, Executive Director

35th Anniversary attendees

On July 18th, over 200 alumni, instructors, friends and family of Yestermorrow gathered to help celebrate the school’s 35th Anniversary. The day was filled with opportunities to reconnect with each other, see projects around the Mad River Valley, talk about Yestermorrow’s legacy in teaching design, check out improvements around campus, and hear about plans for the future.

Larsen River House

In the morning, a school bus and van filled with over 50 participants headed out to visit five homes around the Mad River Valley as part of our Innovative Homes Tour. Started in 2003 as a fundraiser for Yestermorrow’s Scholarship Fund, the Homes Tour has been a favorite with many local architecture lovers. One highlight was a visit to Jon and Mary Larsen’s home on the banks of the Mad River in Moretown. This zero net energy home designed by Maclay Architects was built in 2008-2009 and features green roofs, a 12.6 kW photovoltaic array and solar hot water system, and amazing views down into the river.

Sylvia Smith, architect

Back on campus, while the Timberframing class worked diligently out in the Hangar to raise their timber frame, while John Connell moderated a colloquium of architects and designers including John Anderson, Sibyl Harwood, Ted Montgomery and Sylvia Smith. The goal of the panel was to “create a vocabulary and/or grammar for people not professionally trained in design”. Panelists attempted to answer the following questions: Do you think a more accessible design discourse would have an appreciable impact on the way the school educates or the projects it embraces? What are the most misused (and thus misunderstood) terms of the professional designer, architect, artists’ lexicon? What are the biggest challenges to lofting a more accessible design conversation at the Yestermorrow School? The resulting conversation engaged many members of the audience. You can read some of John Anderson’s comments on the Yestermorrow blog.

Prickly Mountain founding members

Later in the day architect Duo Dickinson moderated a panel on the design/build history of Prickly Mountain featuring a variety of Prickly “founders” who still live nearby, including Dave Sellers, Dorothy Tod, Candy Barr, Richard Travers, Bill Maclay, Jito Coleman, and Randy and Nancy Taplin. We heard about the early days of Dave recruiting architecture students, offering them room and board and $500 for the summer to come up to Vermont to design and build. Duo asked whether something like Prickly Mountain could ever happen in this day and age and the consensus was definitely no- that between the cost of land and building materials these days it would be nearly impossible to replicate a similar type of situation. 

Preliminary Landscape Plan

After the Prickly panel we gathered in the Main Studio for an update on Yestermorrow’s master planning process. John Connell spoke about the history of purchasing the 38-acre Alpen Inn property back in 1990, and I recapped the more recent 5 years of master planning history. In 2011-2012 we worked closely with the Regenesis Group (Bill Reed, John Boecker and Joel Glanzberg) to set the framework for our master planning process, explore the site and our place in the Mad River Valley, and develop a vision, purpose and principles to guide our work going forward. Since then we have created a “Core Team” made up of members of the various stakeholder groups that has been working to develop the plans in more detail, engage with experts in areas of stormwater, wastewater and systems design, and move the plan forward through town and state permitting. All that preparation has brought us to the exciting point where we expect to break ground on the initial infrastructure work next spring and are ready to start designing the first building in the plan—a shop classroom space. We sent out an RFP looking for design/build teams in the spring and received 5 strong proposals. We are excited to announce that we have selected Bast & Rood Architects, along with New England Construction Company to work with us on the first project. Both Mac Rood and Rob Bast (the firm’s two principals) have had a long history of teaching here at Yestermorrow, Mac has served many years on the Yestermorrow Board, including as President, and both have been very active serving the local community and working with groups like ours on collaborative design processes. Paul Sipple is an experienced contractor, and recent graduate of our Passive House Builders Training. He and his crew specialize in commercial structures and high performance building. They have also brought in Yestermorrow board member and instructor Adam Cohen of PassivScience to consult on potential Passive House certification. 

After the big announcement, Mac Rood took the stage to tell everyone about the process for stakeholder input on the new shop design. We’ll kick off with an introductory public meeting on September 2^nd, and then hold a series of mini charrettes divided into different subject topics including envelope, mechanical and energy systems, aesthetics, student involvement, and more to be determined. 

Jacob Mushlin at Yeopardy

A highlight of the evening hour was the unveiling of “Yeopardy” led by former intern and instructor, Jacob Mushlin. He led five teams through a series of trivia questions related to Yestermorrow history, architectural terms, notable personalities of Yestermorrow and more. Then in the second stage of the “YesterOlympics” teams raced to hammer in nails, de-nail the boards, and measure accurately without any measuring implements. Lots of fun was had by both participants and audience members.

We finished the evening with great music from the Eames Brothers Band while sipping local beers, enjoying amazing food, and watching the sun set over the valley (before the torrential downpour started!). Inside we watched old slides and movies from the YesterArchive and had a chance to catch up with many old friends. It was certainly an anniversary to remember.

Connecting to the Designer Within: An Architect’s Immersion into Woodworking

by Anna Lucey, Woodworking Certificate student

Upon waking my first thought is: maybe I can use the planer to taper that wide board! The strangeness of waking with this thought is compounded by the fact that 11 weeks ago I didn’t even know what a planer was. The reality is this: the Yestermorrow Woodworking Certificate Program is a full-immersion course where you eat, breathe, and sleep the art and science of woodworking. As such, there comes a point where your subconscious takes over the sometimes daunting (but, in woodworking, ever-present) task of problem solving.

At work on a small-scale design/build project.

I came to Yestermorrow with a bachelors degree in architecture and four years of entry-level architecture work (a.k.a. “CAD monkeying”) behind me. The Woodworking Certificate Program caught my eye at a time when I felt disconnected from the designer within. I had spent so much time behind a computer screen fine tuning construction documents that I began losing perspective on what it was I actually enjoyed about architecture: problem solving and making things that were simultaneously useful and beautiful. Certainly woodworking, I told myself, must combine aspects of those things. 

And believe me, as someone who dreamt I was a log after our Stump to Sticker section, it does. 

But it goes so beyond that. I’ve been completely blown away by what I’ve learned versus what I expected this course to be like. What I’ve come to realize as our 11-week program comes to an end is that woodworking is special because:

1. You get to work with wood and, by extension, forests, trees, lumber mills, micro- (and macro) loggers, lumber yards, and in wood shops with other woodworkers.  
2. You get to design and build! This process is truly precious to designers because of the conversation between materials and concept. I’ve been blown away at how “design opportunities” (read: “Oh sh*t I just cut this board too short!”), while initially frustrating, can lead to such a rich and sometimes unexpected end product. It’s truly exciting.  
3. A direct cousin of 2, you get to use your hands all day long. The peacefulness of using a chisel or a hand plane is pretty much unparalleled. Even though you may casually drink 5 cups of coffee throughout the day, you’ll still fall into bed exhausted at the end of it.  
4. It may have been Rem Koolhaas who said something along the lines of: “Architecture happens in elephant time while all those outside of architecture expect it to happen in rabbit time.” Yeah, yeah, Rem. We get it. But the beauty of woodworking is that is can and often does happen in rabbit time. This does wonders for the psychological well-being of those involved (read: It won’t take you three years to produce something that is so watered down by value engineering that it barely resembles the original beauty of the object you designed).  
5. You get to smell the difference between walnut and butternut when ripped on the table saw, and in that moment you’ll realize: I love this. 

Hand carving on a shave horse

As with all 20-somethings, I was certain I would know exactly how this adventure in Vermont would go: I would work with my hands, learn a thing or two about wood, and head right back into an architecture office armed with this special new knowledge. But here I am at the end of a truly life-changing 11 weeks. And in this moment, I now realize that it is not the practice of woodworking that will make me a better architect. It is my practice of architecture that will make me a better woodworker. 

And by the way, the planer trick worked great.