This studio partnered with Smokey House Center (SHC), a living lab of more than 5,000 acres in Danby, southern Vermont, to propose new programs aligned with the center's mission of allowing people to engage with the land in meaningful ways. The task was to design small buildings at the edge of the forest to house either temporary visitors or longer-term residents, along with supporting community buildings. The program developed for Community Ecologies at Smokey House Center is designed to build on SHC’s goal of maintaining a working site that promotes sustainable agriculture and forestry practices and fosters relationships between people and place at three different scales: community, collective, and concentrated.

Community: At the largest scale, participants from the Rubenstein School of the Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont will conduct research and make forest health and land-use recommendations. This group may come seasonally, learning from the land directly and working on the entire site.

Collective: At the intermediate scale, people from the region in need of work or housing can help Yoder farms with planting, harvesting, and canning. With this help, the farm may be able to provide more goods to the region and to others living and working at SHC, in time creating a hyperlocal food economy. This group is likely to be multigenerational, so a collective model of housing is needed.

Concentrated: At the most intimate scale, the project will partner with New Frameworks, a local sustainable building group, to offer members of the local or regional community an opportunity to engage in tacit learning about natural materials, including experimentation with plant-based building materials and workshops on traditional joinery.

At each scale, people come together to work with and learn from the place in which they are embedded, in doing so becoming part of the ecological community as a whole.