Interdisciplinary Course Addressing Affordable Housing in Connecticut Wins Architectural Education Award

The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) has named an innovative Yale course aimed at boosting affordable housing in Connecticut as the recipient of a 2024 Architectural Education Award.

Housing Connecticut: Designing Healthy and Sustainable Neighborhoods, an interdisciplinary course led by faculty from Yale SOM, Yale Law School, and the Yale School of Architecture, won the AIA/ACSA Housing Design Education Award.

The annual ACSA awards honor architectural educators for exemplary work in areas such as building design, community collaborations, scholarship, and service. 

The Yale course, which is co-taught by Kate Cooney, senior lecturer in social enterprise and management, pairs interdisciplinary student teams with local developers to craft proposals that increase affordable housing in New Haven neighborhoods. The Yale Urban Design Workshop helped organize the clinic.

Cooney said the award recognizes the course’s unique pedagogical approach that let students, working in conjunction with the state housing authority and developers, learn about affordable housing development in a hands-on way that produced concrete proposals.

“What really stands out about the course, from my perspective, is the structured mentorship students receive from an interdisciplinary team of faculty,” Cooney said. “Teaching with my colleagues from the schools of law and architecture greatly deepens my own understanding of the challenges of producing affordable housing.”

At the course’s end last year, student teams presented their proposals to a gathering of state officials, local stakeholders, community developers, and students and faculty from across the university.

“It was a real highlight,” Cooney said. “But more exciting is the speed with which some of the work has moved from the design toward reality.”