Howard University Architecture Professor Nea Maloo Awarded 2024 Fair Housing Award
Howard University architecture assistant professor Nea Maloo, FAIA, was recently awarded the 2024 Fair Housing Award for Consumer Education by the Association of Real Estate License Law Officials (ARELLO). The Fair Housing Awards recognize programs that promote fair housing and work to eliminate housing discrimination. The awards increase awareness and honor excellence in fair housing education programs to help protect the public.
“It is a true honor to be recognized for this award. Affordable housing design is an important skill to be taught to students to create sustainable innovation and leadership for the future,” said Maloo.
Maloo has been recognized for her impactful work in affordable housing and for changing the status quo through her new interdisciplinary course, Equitable High-Performance Buildings. A recent course project was for students to retrofit a historic African American church in LeDroit Park, Washington, D.C.
Appointed as a Maryland Real Estate Commissioner in 2022, Maloo is committed to shifting the market for affordable housing with sustainable and efficient building practices. Through the development of her course, Equitable High-Performance Buildings, Maloo also initiated the awarding of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy first-ever Zero Energy Design Designation (ZEDD) seal of recognition to Howard University for its master of architecture program with an equitable high-performance energy design concentration.
Maloo also worked with her students to participate in a program called the Envision Resilience Challenge, a community project targeting areas with climate vulnerability. Together with her students, they looked at the former Hillman Street Firehouse in downtown New Bedford as a project site, in collaboration with the Waterfront Historic Area LeaguE. The firehouse, designed and constructed with Romanesque Revival architectural design elements circa 1892, that originally served as an Engine No. 5 House, one of the many neighborhood fire stations in New Bedford, and later served as the city’s defense headquarters. Her team’s project was the retrofit of a single residential building that would meet the zero energy building requirements of the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon Design Challenge, in which her students have successfully competed.
Watch the final New Bedford, Massachusetts project video and read about it on NPR.
For another course Maloo developed, she has won the 2022 Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Course Development Prize. The course, Environmental Justice (EJ) + Health + Decarbonization, was designed to instruct students on how to put sustainable building practice at the center of environmental health, justice and social equity.
Maloo said the course embraces architecture, climate and society together as a whole and empowers students to become leaders in sustainability. “By incorporating design methods of decarbonization and health in building, we will create environmental justice for all.”