At first glance, the elegant steel-and-glass addition to the Najarian home some 20 miles northwest of Manhattan in the suburb of Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, seems straightforward enough. But the longer you look at it quirks slowly reveal themselves: the curve of the roofline, a fold in the north-side wall that gently bends outward, the ever-so-slight torque of the entire structure. There’s a certain delight in noticing these oddities as they percolate into your consciousness—like mastering a Mind’s Eye poster in your friend’s dorm room.
Weird angles are the calling card of architect John Nastasi. They’re also the reason his Hoboken-based firm, Nastasi Architects, has built most of its own residential designs. “We couldn’t get contractors to build complex forms on the budgets we had, so we began doing it ourselves and have been ever since,” he says.
The Najarian addition didn’t rely on the tedious manual calculations and construction methods that Nastasi’s complex forms once entailed. Instead, the architect developed a parametric model—essentially a database that contains geometric information as well as structural properties, materials, and site-specific data like the sun’s angle and prevailing winds. He programmed rules and performance criteria right into the model (such as limiting the addition’s size or height, or setting a baseline standard for energy efficiency), and the form automatically adjusted itself to the specified conditions, like a tree trunk growing naturally around a rock. After evaluating the different options generated by the parametric model, Nastasi refined the design until he and his client were satisfied. He then sent the model to fabricators, who used the data to manufacture the major structural components of the addition—namely the steel frame and window systems—using precise digital methods similar to those used to make cars and yachts. And all this for a price comparable to traditional suburban construction.
It’s a far cry from the string and nails that Nastasi and his staff once used to re-create paper ideas in the real world. Nastasi also insists that parametric modeling is more flexible and adaptable than other prefab methods that rely on mass-produced components and materials that are put together the same way over and over again. He calls the Najarian project a suburban prototype—and he hopes his methods will help redefine how suburban additions, and eventually entire homes, are built.
“The construction of houses hasn’t evolved much in the past 50 years, and that’s partly why we see the same tired styles over and over again: fake colonials, fake Gothic architecture,” he comments. “That’s why I came up with this idea of a smart wing that can adapt easily to conditions at any site, at a cost that’s no greater than the old way of doing things. I’d like to put one of these wings onto 500 houses across the country.” It’s an intriguing goal, but the question remains: Can one small experiment in New Jersey (insert your own toxic-waste joke here) transform suburban design for the masses?
A native of Jersey City, Nastasi hasn’t strayed far from his roots. He studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, returning to New Jersey afterward and launching his firm in Hoboken in 1991. It was a few years later, when designing a $60,000 addition for the Shin family in Closter, New Jersey (that of the strings-and-nails experiment, which won a citation of merit from the local AIA chapter in 1996), that Nastasi began thinking seriously about how to achieve the odd-angled forms he wanted, with fewer headaches. “I was frustrated by my own inefficiencies,” he says.
Nastasi found himself increasingly drawn to computers and 3-D CAD and modeling software, which were, of course, becoming more and more powerful. When he entered Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 2002 for what he calls “a retooling,” he told them he wanted to learn how to craft digital models used for prefabrication that would allow flexibility in the final materials and construction methods.
Nastasi found a perfect test case—or rather, the perfect test case found him—around the time he began his studies. Commercial real estate broker Gregg Najarian was at work flipping through a copy of Momentum, a magazine published by Mercedes, when he came across pictures of a home Nastasi had designed. “It stopped me in my tracks,” says Najarian.
He brought the magazine home to his wife, Arpie Gennetian Najarian, a fine artist and graphic designer who once worked for the design firm Gensler. They’d been searching for an architect to renovate their one-story 1960s home. “This is our guy,” he told her. She agreed instantly. The couple hired Nastasi for the project, which was to include a bed-and-bath wing for themselves and their three young children.
The Najarians were game to let Nastasi experiment with high-flying design methods as long as the budget didn’t break the bank. So experiment he did. Working with one of his students who had a background in mathematics, he first designed the addition from milled Styrofoam covered by a glass composite skin. No dice, he decided—too much of a one-off.
Next he tried a folded-metal structural skin, a solution similar to his thesis at Harvard, which won him the school’s Peter Rice Prize for innovation in architecture and engineering. But again he scrapped the idea. “It was beautiful, but it wasn’t prototype-like. I wanted something that could be made into a more affordable addition for any home,” he recalls.
As they say, the third time’s a charm. Nastasi reduced the structure to a torqued steel frame supplemented by lightweight metal joists available at any home-improvement store, which were the key to making it affordable and feasible. The addition and renovation were completed last spring. The low-slung structure—all white walls and spare furnishings brightened by colorful artwork, including many of Arpie’s mixed-media pieces—stands quietly in contrast to the McMansions that have been built on surrounding lots that once featured more modestly sized homes. “Those just get demolished these days,” says Gregg. “We didn’t want to be wasteful like that. Why not work with what we have?”
Meanwhile, Nastasi was so compelled by what he was learning that he crafted a curriculum to teach young and midcareer designers his new methods. In 2004 he established the Product-Architecture Lab at the Stevens Institute of Technology, an engineering school in Hoboken, where he created a two-year multidisciplinary master’s program. Each class consists of a dozen students—architects, mechanical engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians—who together refine the design methods Nastasi pioneered at Harvard, lending the process a sense of momentum.
That momentum has thus far translated into a smart house he designed for a sculptor in Plano, Texas, and projects as diverse as a kindergarten, a ten-story mixed-use building, and research work for buildings in India and the Middle East (with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Buro Happold). In 2006 Nastasi was short-listed to design a family of pedestrian bridges in four New York City boroughs. Still, it’s suburban homes that seem to have the most hold on the designer. “Architects are missing opportunities to do something important there if they just focus on urban areas,” he laments.
Carlos Cárdenas, who met Nastasi at Harvard, is using the Najarian addition as a case study for his doctoral thesis. “This work challenges the notion that prefabrication must be bound by a very tight set of rules about materials and construction methods,” he points out.Nastasi adds, “There’s a myth that digitally driven fabrication isn’t widely available, but it is—you just have to be willing to go outside of the architectural and building communities to find it.”
