Culebra, Puerto Rico – A team of NYIT architecture students are spending their Thanksgiving holiday working to improve a Puerto Rican beachfront.

The students, under the leadership of Assistant Professor Farzana Gandhi, designed and are building a prototype pavilion to serve as an information kiosk, changing room facility, and social space for beach visitors in Culebra, Puerto Rico.

The current facilities, which were built in 1983, are rundown and uninviting. The students designed a new, versatile structure of wood beams that form small benches and rectangular spaces for dressing and displaying maps of the area.

"Things are going amazing!" fourth-year student Kevin Kawiecki reported from the site of the design-build project, about 17 miles east of the mainland. "I'm so excited each day to wake up and start working on this project with all my colleagues! The constant change in weather has been a challenge that we can't do much about other than storm through it and keep working our hardest (with the exception of a coffee break every so often)."

The group is collaborating with graduate students from the University of Puerto Rico. They have participated in joint videoconferences for the past month as they developed the design and sought community feedback.

The project is part of "Social Impact Design," a new course Gandhi created to focus on a growing area of the architectural and design profession.

"Public interest design is especially powerful when modestly-funded community-based projects in public spaces operate on a small scale to result in changes of large social significance," said Gandhi. "The pavilion can be replicated to instigate interest in a larger scale improvement of an area economically ripe for tourism."

As part of the course, students researched the field of social impact design, created design concepts and proposals, and learned about project management and budgeting. Before they left last weekend, the students raised more than $700 for building materials through bake sales and other activities.

"To be able to make your design have a positive influence on the world around is an incredible feeling and I knew that [the course] would give me the tools to accomplish that," said second-year student Arnost Wallach.

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New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) offers 90 degree programs, including undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees, in more than 50 fields of study, including architecture and design; arts and sciences; education; engineering and computing sciences; health professions; management; and osteopathic medicine. A non-profit independent, private institution of higher education, NYIT has more than 12,000 students attending campuses on Long Island and Manhattan, online, and at its global campuses. NYIT sponsors 11 NCAA Division II programs and one Division I team.

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Elaine Iandoli
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