Editor’s Note: This blog post is by Danny Sagan, the instructor for Yestermorrow’s Green Home Design & Details. Danny is an associate professor of architecture at Norwich University and he shares an architecture practice, DS Architects PLLC, with his wife Alisa Dworsky. Danny’s love of teaching is evident and his students appreciate his “willingness to structure course content to participant’s questions and interests.”

Another student in the most recent round of Green Home Design & Details shared: “Danny was very knowledgeable with the content material, having numerous examples and experiences to pull from for our questions.”

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I first learned about Yestermorrow in the early 1990s when I saw a poster advertising the school on a bulletin board at Yale, where my wife Alisa and I were studying architecture. I learned more about Yestermorrow when I took an architectural materials class at Yale from John Connell, but didn’t get involved as an instructor until a couple years later. I was at a North East Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA) Conference, eating lunch with Steve Badanes, who encouraged Gunnar Hubbard, then Executive Director of Yestermorrow, to bring Alisa and me onto the teaching team. 

Over the years I’ve taught a variety of courses at Yestermorrow, including: Innovative Lightweight Structures, Ecological Design/Build Process and Fast Furniture. I also served on Yestermorrow’s Board of Directors in the late aughts, a time when the Board was deep in strategic thinking. We created the Semester Program and oversaw development of a master plan for the campus, including planning new dorms (one of which is currently under construction). 

I returned to Yestermorrow’s teaching team in 2021 because I was excited about the development of our online curriculum. I had been teaching a green home design course which I realized would translate well to the online format and fit better into my schedule. Teaching over a weekend is too tiring and intense given my schedule and that’s sometimes true for our students, too.

The online format enables us to connect with more people in a more sustainable way. That’s part of the fun of online classes. People are all over. There are people experiencing different climates, neighborhood, and ways of building.

I love teaching Green Home Design & Details because the more information and understanding a homeowner has of systems, the better equipped they are to have a conversation with their architect and builder. In order to get a good green home, a homeowner is going to need to make at least 60 good decisions, other than cost and schedule. One of ways you develop your goals is by understanding the various things a building can accomplish. You can accomplish physical comfort throughout the year. You can accomplish creating a lovely place to live. If you don’t understand the basics of green home building you can’t accomplish any of that.

It’s great when we can take someone who may know a little - or a lot - and get them to a place to make good informed decisions to solve problems for their project. 

The Green Home Design & Details course uses a “flipped classroom” model in which students watch pre-recorded content I have developed and then come to class ready to ask questions as they apply the knowledge to their particular projects. I started teaching this way so that I don’t have to explain over and over again how a heat pump works and take class time to do that. Everyone can watch the video and come ready to figure out how it applies to their project. 

It’s great when people start feeling comfortable with the complexity of it all. What’s the perfect wall? There isn’t one. So we take a systematic approach to designing a building. What does this wall system need to accomplish? Our greatest Green Home Design & Details successes are owner-builders who have designed and built themselves Net Zero (or Net Zero Ready) homes. 

The most successful aspect of the Yestermorrow legacy is homeowners who can GC [general contract] or build their own home, understanding where materials come from and shepherding their own projects to net zero.

The Green Home Design & Details course is fun! You can’t do anything like this without a sense of humor, so I encourage people to enjoy themselves. It’s not all numbers and bad news. The best conversations happen when people talk about where they live, who’s there, and who they work with. 

The thing about green-building is it locates you where you are.

One of the things I hope for the future is that Yestermorrow can continue helping to educate people so they can be advocates in their own communities. We’re in a climate crisis, so we need people pushing their legislatures to make social change through political action.