Affordable Green Roof Apartment Complex Situated in NYC.

NYC is known as one of the world's most flourishing cities. It holds a lot of the USA's well known landmarks, Such as the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and Time square itself. New York is a beautiful place and I'm ecstatic to live here. However, NYC has a severe lack of greenery, In it's busy and fast paced culture, there's not a lot of time to sit down and just settle or take care of your health. In most of the poorer areas of NYC, there's little to no parks or places to just rest and enjoy your day, and the few that are there are insanely dangerous/off putting to bring yourself or your kids to. In these impoverished areas, there's not much of a grounded community, and adding onto that, Food deserts are super common . If you can manage to find a good grocery store within walking distance, and that's a large if, You'll basically have your pockets gouged of any money by the end of your trip.

This apartment aims to combat those issues, to provide a way to have a community be fostered, provide healthy cheaper food this community could have access to, and provide a closed off park for said community.

Internet software/Paid software

Revit - Autodesk software - Used to create the overall Building

Fusion 360 - Autodesk software - Used to create impossible geometry Revit could not achieve I.E: The Bridge.

Blender - Free 3D software. - Used to render the final building and provide a neat image.

Devices necessary

Computer to run Software.

Phone/Camara to take Photos.

Art Supplies

Pencil

Paper

Ruler

Eraser

Online sources/Reference.

During brainstorming I had a lot of ideas.

One was to have a tower of sorts and have each floor have a balcony that stretches far enough to allow for sunlight, However I decided against that design due to security concerns and the overall impossible geometry of each apartment.

Second design (Which I provided an image for) was a Standard apartment building with a section at the very top for Solar panels, and a small enclosed extension for garden space located at it's side. While there is nothing wrong with a building like this, I felt it was too bland and really wouldn't fit with NYC's building structure.

I'd call this Third design my final sketch, though it's really just an improved version of my second design. I extended the building into two, allowing for more room, to make it a lot easier to complete my goal of having a large community garden. Now more vegetation will have direct access to sunlight, and there will be less foot traffic per square foot!

2333 Beverley Rd, Brooklyn, NY 11226

I specifically chose this location as me and my family used to shop here when we needed shoes or new clothes, or just anything, really. I actually had a few fond memories of me and my siblings running around the shoe racks and hiding from one another. However this building has been permanently closed since just before the pandemic. I believe it'd be beautiful if a property that brought me so many good memories, could be used to bring others more heart filled memories.

This area is also quite large, and would fit my desired building nicely.

Here is my Final model/Primary design.

Here we have two apartment complexes with a bridge connecting the two, and a large green space located at the their mutual 6th floor.

To help it achieve it's goal of having a community only garden, I made sure the garden located on the 6th floor is accessible only by the stair case located in Building B, and through Building A's 6th floor. Going in with the idea that these floors would only be accessed via doorman or key card.

Specifically went with this duo design as I felt it would allow more space for the garden and having two different entrances into the space would allow for less crowding and plant exhaustion. You'll also notice that at the top of Building A's roof I added Solar panels, this is to lower energy costs and keep it affordable.

For my first floors, the lobby, I went for a more stable look, I wanted a main shape in the middle to serve as the front desk to provide assistance, I wanted 2 fire safety exits to comply with safety standards, and I provided 3 different elevators for anyone who needed to get to their floors. The other rooms located on the floor are simple cleaning/maintenance/core rooms that help supply things through out the building, such any of the MEP's.

For my apartment floors, you can see that Building A's rooms follow an L shaped pattern while Building B has more square shaped ones. This is to provide a more diverse living space. You'll also notice that each room has a differing apartment layout, not every one's bathroom is the same, making sure that despite living in an affordable housing unit, your space isn't identical to someone else's or another copy and paste. keeping the uniqueness.

I went with a duo apartment complex with Building A reaching up to 8 floors, and Building B reaching only 5. Each full floor contains about 12 rooms, minus the 3 floors located in Building A that only contain about 6 two bedroom, two bathroom apartments each floor. In total, Building A has 66 available apartment spaces, and Building B has 48. Making 114 rooms to be filled with tenants.

A garden of this magnitude would require some form of consideration for it's drainage, I'm here to say that I did consider this in my design. The 6th floor is slightly elevated to allow for duct work to be added between the ceiling of the 5th floor and the 6th's floor's flooring. This is because if left unattended and simply allowing for no proper drainage, the water left on the roof runs the risk of growing mold, of harming the plants, and of seeping down to other floors in the building, leading to a health hazard. For most green roof's a system of multiple layers is applied in this small elevated sector.

Water is given to the plants on the roof, at the very top of this system, then the water is to seem down through the soil, reaching a filtering fabric or just a generic filter. This filter it to allow for only liquid to pass through. Then this water reaches the drainage layer, which will lead to the water either evaporating up into the soil, or exiting the building through it's sewage supply.

It's good to note for this that NYC has strict regulations on how much water is allowed to leave the building and enter the building, Hydrating the plants should be noted with that in mind.

According to this comparison, the average price of an apartment in Brooklyn, NY ranges from $2,100 to $5,100 dollars. Accounting for the fact that this will be an affordable housing unit, I will keep the average apartment price low at $2,100. Noting before that we have 114 Units, the average monthly earnings for the building would be roughly $240k.

Though that might seem really small or really large, the cost of building a building of this size would be roughly 3.8 Million. However, on average, tenants stay in their apartments for 2.3 years, and In just 2 years, you will turn a large profit from this million dollar venture, If you were to manage to sell all 114 apartments, 2.0 Million dollars would be what you come out with. And judging by the facts apartments in this area are being constructed right now, many investors see that as worth it.

For this section, I'm adding in addition information I couldn't fit into the prior mentioned steps and talking about my experience as a whole designing, modeling, and researching for this building.

Designing drawings have always been easy for me as I've been drawing all my life, However researching the topic and truly designing every detail into simple, intelligible sketches proved really difficult for me. I had many, many drawings I had to scrap and most were simple changes to an existing design that wouldn't qualify as it's own feature.

Modeling wasn't too difficult for me, I previously had experience in Blender and Fusion 360 so I viewed Revit as an easy mix of both Softwares. The most frustrating part of Revit was dealing with the lack of default options for different wall textures, or ceiling textures or just textures in general. I also found it really hard to make much impossible geometry work like it does in Fusion, leading to confusion on my end.

Overall, this was a great experience for me, I greatly enjoyed picking up Revit as a program as I've never considered touching it before today. With Revit and AutoCad being an industry standard for most engineering projects I know I'll walk away from this experience knowing I did get something out of it no matter what. That I got self taught training on these programs and now will have an easier time later in my career.