ISUS Construction

The DDN has an excellent article on the latest effort from ISUS, the construction trades charter school: Plans of historic homes get 21st-century updates.

This time ISUS students are reconstructing the houses of famous aviators, but using "green construction" concepts, whith each house demonstrating a certain characterstic of green construction. The paper says that they are building replicas of the family homes of John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, Amelia Earhart, Bessie Coleman, and of course the Wright Brothers. And a house based on Thomas Edison's home.

Apparently the houses will be open to the public before they go on sale.

ISUS was already involved in Wright-Dunbar as they constructed a replica of the Wright Brothers house on Hawthorn Street (where they were living when they invented the airplane), across the street from the actual site.




ISUS is one of the very bright spots in Dayton as they are not only giving training in the building trades, which usually pay pretty good (when there's work), but they are also building houses in the city that fit in with the urban context. They've been doing this in the Wolf Creek area, north of 3rd from Wright-Dunbar. And there was that proposal to have ISUS work with the Grafton Hill neighborhood group to reconstruct the big mansions on Central Avenue (not sure what came of that, but it sounded like a great idea).

So this school is building a pool of tradesmen who could specialized on restoration work and new construction that would fit in with older neighborhoods. Now, with this latest set of houses ISUS is training in green construction combined with historic construction.