By Jay Fox

The Mad River Valley has been attracting eccentrics for longer than anyone can remember. Located in the picturesque Green Mountains of Central Vermont and roughly an hour from Burlington, the rural area is renowned for its artists and artisans. It’s also long been home to Yestermorrow Design/Build School, a 38-acre magnet for members of the architecture, engineering, and construction profession seeking an unconventional approach to high-performance building.

Founded in 1980, Yestermorrow grew out of the experimental design-build culture of nearby Prickly Mountain*, where a small band of architects during the 1960s rejected the separation between drawing and making. As Yestermorrow Executive Director Britton Rogers explains, Prickly Mountain’s founding principles were simple but radical: design decisions improve when the designer understands materials in hand, and construction improves when the builder understands intent. “They’re not two separate processes,” he says.

Conventional training tends to be more siloed. Yestermorrow instructor and faculty member Wynne Hannan notes that the trades typically favor the orthodoxy of “how it’s always been done” rather than new and disruptive ways of doing things. Meanwhile, architects learn abstract theory and how to apply formal concepts to design, but they are often divorced from the particular and the concrete. As a result, the building industry remains inflexible at a time when increasingly rigorous building standards require adaptability.

Following Prickly Mountain’s philosophy, Yestermorrow breaks with familiar patterns and the inertia of convention. Students come from all walks of life, and this is even visible in the makeup of the classes. “There are a huge age range and a diversity of gender identities and skills. It adds so much value,” Hannan says. Rather than being dominated by white, cis men in their twenties and thirties, “Yestermorrow courses look different,” she says. “I love being part of this community for that reason.”

It is entirely normal for a veteran carpenter to sit beside a relatively handy homeowner interested in retrofitting their home or an architecture student still awaiting their first internship. Rather than positioning one pathway as superior, the school treats diversity of both perspective and experience as assets. As a result, students learn from one another and step out of their comfort zones, forcing more advanced practitioners to reexamine building fundamentals, designers to confront buildability, and tradespeople to gain more of an appreciation of design theory.

As Hannan explains, most courses move deliberately between studio and jobsite. Students might sketch envelopes and conduct pencil tests in the morning, and then head outdoors to test tapes, install membranes, and actually see if their designs can be replicated in the real world. Here they often encounter friction because a detail that looks elegant in a drawing set may prove impossible at 20°F on a windy hillside.

If this heuristic approach is rarely taught to designers, the opposite is true of builders who rarely see the inside of a studio. Yestermorrow’s response is to collapse the divide and to provide students with a more integrative environment all while industry experts (especially practitioners actively working in the field) temporarily join full-time instructors to create a curriculum that is dynamic and on the cutting edge.

Instruction Grounded in Experience

Rogers became deeply interested in architecture and urban design from a very young age, well before receiving his undergraduate degree in architecture from the University of Texas at Austin. He then worked at a few firms in New York City and Connecticut on residential and institutional projects, later shifting to a focus on environmental design when the housing market collapsed and architecture firms worldwide were forced to cut staff. The pivot would push Rogers to pursue a Master of Environmental Design from Yale University, and to question his understanding of buildings.

“During the recession, I started coming up to Yestermorrow as a student because I wanted to learn more about alternative forms of construction and to really understand the construction process better,” he says. Though he stayed on at Yale to teach advanced design and urban history for several years after obtaining his Certificate in Sustainable Building and Design from Yestermorrow, Rogers eventually came back to the Vermont school to become a teacher.

Similar to Rogers, Hannan took a somewhat circuitous route to Yestermorrow. She has a background in outdoor education and had done some building in a shop during college, but it did not play a prominent role in her professional life in the years after graduating from university. This changed after she joined a timber framing workshop as a means of connecting with her community. “It’s a great way to get people engaged with building in a simple way that is really impactful,” she says.

In time, Hannan also began working with lime plaster. She explains that learning about the properties of these natural materials was her entrée into the world of building science and the dynamics of buildings systems. That interest went into hyperdrive when Hannan started doing a major retrofit on her house in Southern Vermont. Originally constructed in the early 2000s, the home used structurally insulated panels that had been poorly installed, resulting in a host of problems.

While the experience may have been the stuff of nightmares for many homeowners, Hannan’s natural curiosity gave her a different perspective. She saw it as a learning experience and a way to delve further into the world of building science. It ultimately led her to Yestermorrow, where she now teaches several classes but remains focused on timber framing.

Like Hannan, Rogers has also had a personal learning journey due to a retrofit. In his case, it is a mid-century modern home in the Mad River Valley with loads of windows and historic details that he wants to preserve. “I’ve learned more about the field of architecture and the process of construction and high-efficiency detailing by having to do it on this building,” he says, and jokes that he’s on perhaps phase seven of twelve or thirteen.

More than just shoring up his skills as a builder, he says that the experience has also given him a better understanding of the materials and the building science underlying the behavior of the assemblies.

Alternatively, Rogers notes that students who hold firm to certain absolutes push instructors to reconsider concessions that they’ve made, to look into the advances in alternatives. “They push us to think, ‘Maybe we were getting too comfortable using this foam here. Is there a better way?’” Rogers says.

“Hands-on education is the great equalizer,” Rogers says. It doesn’t matter if the student is a builder with 30 years of experience or a designer who’s never picked up a hammer; both are bringing their perspectives to the table. It’s a great learning environment without feeling remedial to anyone.

Hannan also notes that the experience at Yestermorrow is meant to be shared. It’s not about an individual’s education, but the spread of knowledge and technique couched in the language of building science. Students carry knowledge back to firms, crews, and clients. Every student becomes a node in a broader, decentralized network of high-performance builders. Those builders then influence others and drive organic change.

“To me, it’s the education of people—not just advances in technology or policy—that is the decisive factor in driving reform,” Rogers says.

“When I teach timber framing and, at the end of the week, we all come together and create a structure, and then experience what it is to create space and occupy space together, it’s profound,” Hannan says. “That sense of inspiration carries on. If you can create a sense of wonder and confidence in people, sometimes that’s all you need.”

*For those who want to learn more about Prickly Mountain, there is now a feature-length documentary (aptly titled Prickly Mountain) by filmmaker and Yestermorrow alumnus Allie Rood.