One of the few positives that emerged from the ashes of 9/11 is the chance it presented the area’s community of artists, architects, planners and builders to envision a new World Trade Center — to cut from whole cloth a space that was at once vibrant, beautiful and productive.

Unfortunately for the residents of lower Manhattan, realizing that vision has proven a bit messy. Today, the scene around the World Trade Center includes plenty of jackhammers, cranes, hard hats and yellow tape, but as yet little beauty.

East Rutherford native Ninett Moussa, for one, did her part to change that.

Moussa, a 22-year-old architecture student in the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s five-year B.Arch. program, collaborated with fellow students under the guidance of professor Richard Garber to win a competition sponsored by lower Manhattan civic groups frustrated with the unsightly maze of walkways and scaffolding around the World Trade Center. The competition’s challenge: to design and build a construction site walkway that was both useable and aesthetically pleasing.

The project represented a unique opportunity for Moussa and eight other young architects to work on a design from conception to construction while still undergraduates. But the collaboration was originally a matter of necessity. Though Professor Garber’s design was selected last September from among hundreds participating in the competition, he still had to make constructing a full-scale prototype by November compatible with his fall teaching schedule. Garber’s solution was to make the project an independent study—and a lesson in innovation—for his students.

"I heard about it through the grapevine," Moussa says of the small group of students Garber was recruiting to build the mockup. "Richard was my teacher, and I heard that he had a couple of students working on this, so I went and asked to get involved."

Soon, Moussa and her colleagues were working around the clock in the NJIT School of Architecture’s new fabrication laboratory, or "Fab Lab." Moussa’s role focused on the fabrication of the walkway’s major parts. Using a new program called Rhino and a massive machine called a Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) Mill, Ninett fed coordinates and cutting instructions from a virtual model of the walkway directly to the machine that created its full-scale plywood parts, eliminating the need to work with two-dimensional models on paper plans.

"The greatest part about working on this was learning how to use the mill," said Moussa. "Because of the scale of the project, you are actually doing all the labor yourself. You can build something from start to finish yourself, with no middleman."

But though the process was technologically advanced, it remained time consuming.

"We worked hard on fabrication for about a month, using all our spare time. We would work in shifts, two or three of us at a time, overseeing the CNC mill," said Moussa.

In addition to the CNC mill, Moussa used a highly pressurized stream of water called a water jet to cut the installations metal reinforcing gussets.

Once completed, the walkway—officially a "Best Pedestrian Route"—was installed by union workers along a 27-foot stretch of construction site at John Street, two blocks west of the World Trade Center. Moussa and others then returned to paint and light the structure. The finished product resembles a series of slanted orange girders interspersed with white panels. Studding the panels are multi-directional, arrow-shaped cutouts through which night lights shine—a design feature meant to reflect the vertigo-inspiring feelings associated with navigating an urban construction site.

It will remain on site at John Street at least through the end of the month.

Moussa, who attended elementary and middle school in East Rutherford, knew she wanted to be an architect by the time she started high school at the Bergen Academies in Hackensack. Now, as she finishes her final semester at NJIT, she is in the process of interviewing for jobs at architectural firms.

"Ideally, I’d like to do something that helps people, maybe something abroad." Laughing, she adds: "I’d love to work for a non-profit, but now there is also the necessity of making money."

Though the prize-winning project was recently honored again with an award from the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, Moussa thinks its potential has yet to be fully tapped.

"The opportunity to put this installation in the midst of all the construction that’s going on already is pretty great. But it shouldn’t have been limited to that corner. What’s so great about this design is that it could go on for miles. The design is multipliable, kind of infinite. It’s almost like a snake; you could see it sneaking around corners, maybe even making its way down in to the subways. It’s a really nice statement in the middle of all that commotion."