Professor, students design and build safe house for teen mothers

Robert Michel Charest, associate professor in the Interior Architecture department at UNCG, is preparing to put the finishing touches on what he considers to be his proudest accomplishment: a 4,500 square foot, six room, seven bathroom “green” house in the Eastside Park area of Greensboro.

Built with the help of nearly 150 students from the interior architecture department, more than half of the students in the department itself, over the course of three years, My Sister Susan’s House is set to open on March 1 and will serve as place of refuge for pregnant teenagers and teenage mothers offering them shelter and counseling.

My Sister Susan’s House is named after the YWCA of Greensboro’s Teen Mentor Program Director, Susan Cupito, who nearly three years to the day of its completion approached Charest at a UNCG luncheon to sign on to this project. She would remain a driving force throughout the process.

“This is pretty much her baby,” said Charest. “She always felt that teenage mothers in Greensboro or in Guilford County or in the world need someplace to be that was judgmental, that was not violent and that would actually help young women that are children themselves, now young parents, to feel empowered, to finish school, to be productive and happy citizens. That is not something that is often available to them…she’s been working at this for 8 or 9 years and we felt here in the department of interior architecture and Urban Studio that we could do this.”

The finished product is a house that stands out, to say the very least, a result of Charest’s passion for what he calls “gentle Modernism.”
“Greensboro is a very traditional city, for the most part in terms of its architecture.” said Charest. “It’s very reserved… [Susan’s House] is not necessarily what you would find in New York or L.A., but it is definitely trying to move the vocabulary of architecture forward in a gentle way.”

Charest got the chance to move his own literal vocabulary during a ribbon cutting ceremony this past Monday where Chancellor Linda Brady and Sen. Kay Hagen were on hand and spoke of the great potential My Sister Susan’s House had to offer. It was a moment that Charest described as “surreal.”

“You have these very important figures in national and local politics talking about how great this facility is, how great my work was and so forth; and you are waiting to take the podium wanting to say something that fits into that but also addresses the bigger picture which is the importance of the University to actually keep being very aggressive in developing curriculum and doing very cutting edge research… I was very nervous about what I was going to say and how I was going to follow up the Senator and the Chancellor and you want to say something that is meaningful because this is a meaningful moment.”

The notable quote from his turn at the podium was something very fitting for a man describe by a Dr. Laura Sims, dean of the school of Human Environmental Sciences as a “…not only a visionary, but a workaholic.”
“Always bite off more than you can chew,” Charest said. “It’s a moral imperative.”

A native of Montreal, Quebec, Charest has been a professor at UNCG since 2003. He resides in Greensboro with his wife, Amanda, and their four-year-old son, Liam.