Refugio | an Affordable Housing Complex in Corona, California

Hi there, it's Newton! I am in Norco College in California for Pre-Engineering! Nice to meet you! This instructable features an modular affordable apartment housing project that is based in Corona, CA! Affordability is crucial in downtown Corona as its close proximity to Disneyland and the general Los Angeles area, driving up the surrounding land prices. Whether affording to live through state grants or just living in general, affordable housing is a place that you can reliably call yourself home. This apartment complex is named “Refugio”; a Spanish word for refuge.

Hardware

Windows Computer

A Fan | Your Computer could make your room temperature rise up to 90F during renderings.

For Sketching

Paper

Pencil

Architecture Scale

Software

Autodesk Revit 2026

Autodesk Insight - Solar Analysis Integration into Revit

Twinmotion for Revit 2025.1.1

The Refugio will be dedicated to providing supportive housing for at-risk and formerly homeless military veterans and their families in Corona and the surrounding Inland Empire.

Why Veterans?

Riverside County has one of the largest veteran populations in California. Many veterans face challenges such as PTSD, difficulty adapting to the job market. This leads to larger rates of unemployment, housing instability and homelessness.

Supportive Services

The most crucial part about an affordable housing complex is supportive services. On-Site Services such as a wellness center and multipurpose room that can be used for mental and physical health support through partnerships.

Job Market

Corona’s economy, including the whole of southern California, is transitioning. There are more demanding jobs such as solar installations, and American infrastructure maintenance. The solution is to give opportunities for training on-site and host workshops for the high demand employment.

Transportation

The proposed site is an underutilized commercial lot within a quarter-mile of the North Main Corona Metro link Station, and bus stops.

The Location

This transit-oriented development site is ideal. It provides residents with direct access to regional transportation, reducing reliance on personal vehicles and connecting them to job centers across Southern California.

The Building’s Design

The Refugio is designed as an 3-story, mixed-used building that is functional and iconic. It contains a wellness center, multipurpose room, an mail room, and secure bike storage. Designed up to hold 50 rooms for up to 2 persons and up to 20 rooms for families up to 4. Built with energy savings in mind. By supporting local sustainability goals, it creates a healthy and clean air environment. Based on the surrounding architecture, this building will be designed to fit in a Tuscan Style Architecture. Tuscan Architecture allows sunlight to reflect off the building, allowing energy savings, and less building cooling cost.

Before you model, it is recommended that you sketch your ideas on paper first. In my instance, creating modular blocks allows for easier design and easier modeling. Grab a pencil, a piece of paper and an architecture scale. My design consist of everything you would see in a normal apartment.

Designing directly from scratch is definitely a challenging process. The easiest way to overcome that is to split the building in chunks. In this way, the modeling is simple as “clicking the blocks together”. In this case, using 4+ years of Autodesk Revit experience from high school; modeling is easy with documentation. Using my experience definitely made modeling easier, however I wanted to experiment. For instance, I experimented using Autodesk Insight.

Autodesk Insight is a powerful building performance analysis software that integrates with design tools like Revit to get an understanding of a building's energy and environmental performance, including detailed solar analysis. It helps architects and engineers make informed design decisions from early conceptual stages through design development to optimize for energy efficiency and sustainability. In my instance, using solar analysis can estimate the optimal surface for solar panels and calculate energy cost with and without solar panel.

This is where the project comes to life. Twinmotion is a real-time rendering engine that creates a real-like experience, allowing for immediate visual feedback.

And there you have it! You just designed affordable housing for the masses! Thank you for taking the time to look at my iteration of this problem. Getting our generation to think further beyond and create newer solutions that can solve a difficult problem.