Just a 20-minute drive and a 15-minute boat ride will take you to one of Yale’s secret marvels. Nestled among privately owned islands, jagged rocks and fishing boats lies Horse Island.
Yale’s Peabody Museum owns Horse Island, the largest of approximately 100 Thimble Islands off the coast of Connecticut. It stands to demonstrate the possibilities of sustainable, regenerative research and architecture.
Horse Island houses two buildings: the Clark House, which David Heiser, Peabody director of student programs, describes as “a big, beautiful storage closet,” and a research center. The research center was designed through a collaboration between Yale students, the Yale Building Lab and the Peabody Museum, aiming to make architecture and science more sustainable in both practice and education.
“If you start thinking systemically about this stuff, you can never approach a problem without it again,” Alan Organschi ARC ’88, director of the Yale Building Lab, said. “It’s an absolute model for how we should be educating people.”
The research center
The research center exists thanks to a Yale seminar on regenerative building and design led by Organschi.
Students designed the building in class and later built it as summer interns with the support of Organschi’s architecture firm, GOA, and the Peabody Museum. After 10 to 12 months of building and transporting — a tricky task involving moving wooden planks and glass panels from boat to island in the cutty ocean waves — the building was complete.
The center’s design was made to challenge wasteful building practices, beginning with using local materials to ensure the conception of the building was sustainable.
“One of the regenerative design principles is, work as locally as you can with the local materials,” Heiser said.
To work with local materials, the building used a lot of sassafras, fast-growing trees crowding the island. This “weedy” tree, which can actually be used to make root beer, as Heiser explained, competes with healthy trees on the island, so cutting them down cleared space both for the building and the other plants and decreased carbon waste from transporting wood to the island.
The building is also sustainably powered, with solar panels powering WiFi, microscopes, lights and even a mini fridge.
True regenerative building, Heiser and Organschi explained, considers the whole life cycle of a building, including what its end of life will be, not just the way that it is built.
As such, the research center was built to be taken apart piece by piece. There were “no nails used in this, just bolts and screws,” as Heiser explained. This ensures that if there is, one day, no further use for the center, it can be taken apart and removed from the island.
Another unique part of the building is the flooring, which was used in a Federal Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives experiment, Heiser said.
The department tried to see how to build taller buildings out of wood. After the experiment ended, the department wanted to cut these wood pieces into six-inch blocks to hand out to tourists. The team thus used the wood as the flooring of the research center and in other projects around New Haven.
These building practices illustrate the values that the Yale Building Lab, GOA and the wider team encourage — sustainability and waste reduction — to mitigate the negative building environmental impacts.
“We are either an ongoing source of these negative consequences or we are part of the solution,” Organschi said. “It’s really an all-hands-on-deck proposition of regenerative building, to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions. It’s been a focus of our firm and I’m proud of that work.”
The research
Since being built, the research center has housed a vast variety of scientists. Work on the island mainly focuses on the rocky intertidal zone, the space between land and sea that’s often submerged in salty water but is also exposed to air for multiple hours a day. Different species of crabs, plants and mollusks have adapted to live in this intertidal zone.
The interest in this environment began with Addison Emery Veryll, a curator of invertebrate zoology in the late 1800s. He documented over 1,000 species on the island, work that is continuously being followed up on by faculty and students.
“Ecologists have realized over the years that things are a little bit different on an island,” Heiser said.
Islands stand out compared to the mainland with their ecological differences, with gene pools and organism interactions often being different. As such, there are many long-term ecological monitoring projects on Horse Island by Yale research scientists such as Mary Beth Decker and Casey Dunn GRD ’03 ’05.
Decker describes Horse Island as a “living laboratory” — she has been taking her classes there for 12 years now, highlighting the island as an easily accessible opportunity to monitor species and understand the “ups and downs” of ecosystems.
Dunn adds that the island is “magical to share with the students.” As such, the Peabody Museum encourages summer interns to work on the island on projects such as plant and bird surveys.
Even artists like Suzanna Zak, Claire Hungerford and Patricia Voulgaris have stayed as artists-in-residence at the research center overnight — Heiser hopes to have Voulgaris’ work exhibited before the end of the year.
The island itself
Aside from the research center and its work, the island has many other features that highlight its commitment to sustainability. One example is its throne-esque toilet. It sits on a large compost tank to ensure that waste is composted and spread on the land, with a solar-powered fan continuously drawing air through the tank.
The Clark House, which Heiser explained is currently just used for storage, is surrounded by Stony Creek pink granite — a rock that readers may recognize from the base of the Statue of Liberty or the base of the dinosaur sculpture outside the Peabody Museum.
The island also retains many features from its past life, when the Clark House was owned by residents. For example, in the middle of the island remains a cistern, which was used to pump water to the house when there was no reliable connection to the mainland and a hand crank generator where liquid fuel would be pumped through to provide gas for the house.
The Yale community
According to Skelly, the island is an interdisciplinary space open to the Yale community, as he believes this is a “core function” of museums. As such, Peabody’s mission is to make the island accessible for research and work of all kinds.
“It is a resource for the Yale community, and we are very open to hearing ideas that people bring to the table,” Skelly said. “This isn’t just for science. We want people from all different disciplines — this kind of environment is informative to whatever their practice is.”
The team emphasized the importance of interdisciplinarity and commitment to not leaving work on the island up to just one group.
Organschi explained that they are “integrating the social and natural sciences into architectural decision-making, extending the personnel involved” so that “it’s not people in public health wondering what people in architecture think about; we’re trying to work closer with them.”
Horse Island spans 17 acres at low tide and around 14 at full tide.
Contact Zoe Beketova at zoe.beketova@yale.edu.