Time is flying! The Junior, Senior and Second Year Graduate students are already approaching their fourth week in the 2014 Praxis Studios, three courses designed to facilitate collaboration among various skill sets and interests.
The first option presented to the students to chose from is a postindustrial landscape in Summerville, New Jersey. Instructor Frank Gallagher and students are working with the township, challenged to develop a restoration plan that explores the potential of enhancing and creating wetlands within an urban brownfield while providing a green network of open spaces between the Raritan River and the downtown core of the city.
Option number two is led by Assistant Professor Kathleen John-Alder, an investigation of a Jersey Homestead community now called Roosevelt. Located in Monmouth County, New Jersey, Roosevelt is a borough with a deep cultural history; a landscape with multiple and constantly changing narratives. Students of this studio are examining the layers of this landscape and expressing their findings through techniques such as model making, creation of timelines, sequential framing, process mapping, transects, ideograms, collage, juxtaposition and selective erasure.
The third studio course is just outside the doors of Blake Hall, titled "The Nichol Avenue Project: visible and invisible connections between community and campus". Taught by Instructor Richard Alomar, students are studying Nichol Ave as an edge condition between Cook Campus and the adjacent New Brunswick neighborhood. The goal is to engage actively in the process of community design, place making and programing based on factors such as analysis, community workshops, and digital and analog mapping.
The walls of the three studio rooms are quickly filling up with inventory and analysis, sketches, maps and idea so stay tuned to see the work of theses innovative young minds!
