SBHS architects take first with house design

Architectural Design Club team will go to the national competition in Dallas.

By: Marisa Maldonado
   Last year, the newly formed Architectural Design Club at South Brunswick High School heard about the Technology Student Association State Competition. They started working on their model two days before the competition, finding that their limited time frame resulted in a product that couldn’t compete with the others.
   This year, they started designing their project, a 1,600-square-foot house for a retired couple, in October, several months before the competition. They scanned architecture magazines, sketched blueprints and spent dozens of hours building a scaled-down model of the house.
   And this year they were ready for the judges. In April, the team placed first in the Technology Student Association State Conference’s model category and second in the design category. They now go on to the national competition in Dallas on June 22.
   "Most of (the other houses) looked like Barbie houses," said Pooja Gandhi, the club’s vice president and a senior. "Ours looked like a real house."
   South Brunswick High School offers four levels of architecture classes, but the club was formed last year to give students who wanted more in-depth involvement with the field. They started last year with about five regular members.
   This year there were nine students on the winning team: Ben Hochberg, Michael Lee, Pooja Gandhi, Shaun Rosario, Ben Ehrlich, Anisha Satyarthi, Laura Troccoli, Prachi Pisal and Brumika Patel.
   The team designed the two-story, one-bedroom house for an active retirement couple living in the Pacific Northwest, likely part of the baby boomer generation. Putting the house on a gently rolling hill set the design apart from the others, as did a loft that was built so it extended outward from the back of the house like a deck.
   They kept the design minimal, using high ceilings to maximize the space in the house and large windows to bring in the landscape of trees and rivers, and used neutral colors such as hunter green and pale gold for the interior’s design.
   "There wasn’t anything in there we didn’t make," said Anisha, a junior.
   Handcrafting each piece of the model became time consuming. There was no time for extracurricular activities before the competition, said Laura, a junior.
   Instead the team spent two-thirds of the last three days before the competition building the model at adviser Lisa Sokol’s house.
   The students arrived at her house to work at 9 a.m. and didn’t leave until 2 the next morning.
   "I kept feeding them sugar all night," said Ms. Sokol, the school’s primary architecture teacher. "I figured caffeine was against school rules."
   The qualities that fueled their drive could be found in a poster on Ms. Sokol’s wall, the students said, reading: "Patience, perseverance, a desire for excellence and attention to detail."
   Architecture is a unique field, said Ben Ehrlich, a sophomore. Many other disciplines, such as design, can enhance architecture, but architecture cannot be applied to other disciplines, he said.
   "We’re like a yacht club — exclusive," he said.
   At the competition, the group went up against about 30 other teams from across the state. They were judged by professors from The College of New Jersey on a 100-point scale: 80 points for their model and 20 points for their sketch notes.
   They don’t know what score they received, but Ben Hochberg guessed sarcastically they scored a "90 out of 80" on the model portion.
   It was good enough to score them a victory. They beat other schools with years of experience, including High Tech High School in North Bergen, which has been featured on "The Oprah Winfrey Show."
   Now the three seniors on the team — Ben Hochberg, Pooja and Michael — might have a tough choice to make. The high school’s commencement falls on the same day as the model competition in Dallas.
   Several other schools have called the national organization with the same conflict, Ms. Sokol said. They hope to attend graduation and leave immediately afterward for Dallas.
   In the meantime there won’t be much room for senioritis for the team. They’ll be spending the weeks before the competition refining their notes and preparing their model for its national debut. This time around they’ll likely apply again the perseverance they have learned.
   "If we had to stay up, we had to stay up until it was perfect," Pooja said.