The Yale Building Project’s house from 2002 (Yale Building Project photo)

Even though sustainability is all the rage these days, most people think about it in terms of green buildings and renewable power. They forget, or don’t know, that sustainability is also concerned with social well-being, and that the principles of sustainability need to be incorporated into lesson plans.

In this respect, schools of architecture have been ahead of the game for decades. Design-build programs — like the famous Rural Studio at Auburn University, or similar programs at the University of Kansas or the University of Washington — have harnessed students’ minds and muscles to build homes and other structures for impoverished communities.

The Yale Building Project, started by the architect Charles Moore, was among the first of these programs, beginning in the activist era of the late 1960s. Yale University Press has just released a book by an architectural historian, Richard W. Hayes, that covers the history of the program. Its no-nonsense title is The Yale Building Project: The First 40 Years.

After arriving at Yale to teach, Moore took cues from the progressivism of the times and pushed students out of the studio and into the real world. “Moore was opposed to students spending too much time in the drafting room if it led to sealing themselves off from actual experience,” Mr. Hayes writes in the introduction.

The resulting projects are displayed and described, year by year, in the following pages. Among the most interesting projects is a park pavilion built in 1984, when public buildings were a focus of the program. The roof trusses are composed of splayed, interlocking boards.

Over all, as one might expect from students, the work is not particularly radical in shape, but the buildings are solid, reflecting architectural trends of their times. The earliest works, in Kentucky, were wood-clad community centers, with a strong resemblance to Moore’s Sea Ranch Condominium development, in California, built only a year or two earlier. (The book reports that those first two buildings, from 1967 and 68, have been destroyed by vandalism and fire.)

After a focus on public buildings, the Building Project began to concentrate on housing. Mr. Hayes says that the focus on housing might have been influenced by a renewed interest in domestic architecture, or the popularity of do-it-yourself house programs on TV. “But for the students, what mattered was the social responsibility of building affordable housing in some of New Haven’s poorest neighborhoods,” he writes.

Initially in this period, the program worked with Habitat for Humanity and turned out a number of traditional-looking houses.

The latest projects are mainly affordable yet striking shed-roofed modern homes that would fit right in the pages of Dwell. “What distinguishes the program today is its embrace of design innovation within tight and unforgiving real-world constraints,” Mr. Hayes writes.

In that sense, it is a sound lesson plan for living in the 21st century.

The Yale Building Project’s house from 2004 (Yale Building Project photo)