NJIT students solving Urban Challenge

5:15 pm | Architecture, New Jersey Institute of Technology | No comment

Thirteen students at the New Jersey Institute of Technology are trying their best to find an answer to an urban challenge: Can an inexpensive home avoid ending up like their horrible box-like pioneers?

A student Joan Lui shows her hand made model of a townhouse that she has been working on for Habitat Newark during an architecture class at NJIT in Newark in November.

Part of an alliance with Habitat for Humanity, students were given real-world experience and gives the non-profit with new concepts for its homes.

The students have drawn numerous ideas last September that will be utilized to construct 7 multi-family townhouses on Ridgewood Avenue like a simple project that will restore the city’s building design.

The city builders said that three-level buildings lack design qualities, and it should be replaced by a design that requires organizing it into place than in a Rubik’s Cube, with a topsy- turvy regulations, green aspect, and stretched budgets that must be monitored.

Detailed shot of sketch and a hand-made model that Cara Constantino, NJIT student, has been working on to design townhouses for Habitat Newark during an architecture class.

The working designs still consist of ingenious characteristics in the assigned 1,500 square-feet. There are uncovered courtyards inside, private places amid the house for children’s safety. Others have added environmental features, such as tilted roofs that will catch and store rainwater in a rain garden, and “solar chimneys”, vertical shafts that better aerate apartment buildings.

Alex Merlucci, 21, of Kinnelon , one of the students who describes the mission as noble though it is complicated and challenging, said that their concentration is to build efficient homes with the significance of architecture – “a reason for every designed component”. They are not only trying to give people a shelter, but also a home.