Image courtesy of NJIT Hillier College of Architecture and Design

For the Fall 2021 school term, the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Hillier College of Architecture and Design (HCAD) welcomed its students back to in-person learning. The College is comprised of the School of Art and Design and the New Jersey School of Architecture, a vibrant community of undergraduate and graduate architecture and urban design students and faculty. As the academic year comes to a close for the winter holiday Archinect was invited to sit in on the Fall 2021 Super Review which took place virtually on December 9 to learn more about the pedagogy and studios at Hillier College.

The review focused on the Master of Urban Design Studio and Bachelor of Architecture Option Studios, featuring presentations from seven studios. The virtual review was moderated by Associate Professor and Director of the School of Architecture Kelly Hutzell, Senior University Lecturer and B.Arch/B.S. Arch Coordinator Mark Bess, and Associate Professor and M.Arch/M.S. Arch Coordinator Gernot Reither.

During the virtual presentation, Kelly Hutzell shared that the Super Review is not only an opportunity to celebrate student work but also a chance to reflect on its upper-level studio curriculum and pedagogy. "This is a chance to foster self-reflection," expressed Hutzell during the review's virtual introduction. She added that the goal of the Super Review is to "stimulate conversation of the upper-level studio work, specifically in the Option Studios and the Master of Urban Design (MUD) studio (previously known as MIP) and how it relates to contemporary practice and the current local and global challenges that we face.”

At the heart of NJIT Hillier College of Architecture and Design is a robust group of faculty members committed to providing a design curriculum that promotes civic engagement and climate action. Hillier College is located in Newark, New Jersey, the most populous city in the state. In August 2020 Anthony Schuman led the effort to document and formalize the Newark-based studios of many faculty into an entity now known as the Newark Design Collaborative.  “The issues confronting Newark neighborhoods today are complex and at times seemingly insurmountable. The expertise that the Newark Design Collaborative brings to the table is based in the practice of architecture and urban design as a means to shape our society through the built environment."

The NDC's mission is to work and collaborate in partnership with the City of Newark. They explain, "to fulfill this mission we are bringing together the expertise and experience of NJIT faculty, city agencies, and other community stakeholders in the planning and design of a more equitable, sustainable, and prosperous city. The collaborative aims to contribute our collective expertise to Newark's development while engaging community perspectives in that development and educating future designers and planners." 

Five of the seven studios which presented at the Fall 2021 Super Review focused on the City of Newark. Students connected with local neighborhood groups, civic leaders, planners, stakeholders, and private developers throughout the semester as they developed their projects. As I sat and watched the presentations unfold, it was great to see each student's project manifested after weeks of research and analysis. During the review, studio instructor Darius Sollohub shared that students were "discovering new things during the design process that suggested outcomes," that were influential in their final results.

Across all seven studios, students addressed sustainability, transportation, housing, homelessness, community engagement, and infrastructure. In addition, the five Newark-based studios offer a unique look into design proposals that expand on previous studio work and continued research that could directly impact future projects in the city. For example, Professor, MUD Program Coordinator, and co-founder/principal of Interboro, Georgeen Theodore, focused on the urban scale in her studio Newark's New Green District.

During the review, she explained that the studio collaborated with the United States General Service Administration (GSA) to help them reimagine the public realm of their campus located in downtown Newark. Professor Theodore shared, "We built on the work of the previous two  MUD (formerly known as MIP) studios. In the Spring of 2019, we first did a plan for the whole city, working with all 17 neighborhoods. This resulted in a two-volume publication, an atlas, and proposals for each of the wards." In the Fall of 2019, Professor Theodore and her studio continued to focus on the downtown area, resulting in a highly detailed model of the downtown. This semester, her studio focused on a district in the downtown civic core of the city that they've called "the New Green District." Together with her students, they created a new framework focusing on specific public space improvements.

Projects addressed the history of Newark's Civic Campus, solutions for activating the civic core, and proposed design solutions to improve not only public space but mobility as well. What makes Professor Theodore's studio an extraordinary learning experience is the studio's goal in providing graduate students and ambitious undergraduate upper-level students with the ability to interact with real clients and local stakeholders to help shape future infrastructure proposals and investments within the city of Newark. The end goal was to develop a district-scale framework for the city's federal core by addressing the "urban ensemble" of civic buildings within the site in addition to two privately managed housing structures.

Broken up into three phases, Professor Theodore's students first worked through urban analysis and site assessments to map the district and its issues. The second phase focused on "Public Space Frameworks" that addressed sustainability, equity, and inclusion within the public realm. The third and final stage of the studio focused on the students developing schematic designs for the site. The primary goal was to create a plan that would optimize the urban framework each student completed in the second stage of their design process. Professor Theodore's studio was followed by an investigation of the Newark Penn Station Option Studio led by Associate Professor Darius Sollohub.

Professor Sollohub shared that the studio focused on the work of the Newark Penn Station, and was sponsored by the city of Newark in collaboration with the New Jersey Transit Corporation and consultants from WSB I FX Collaborative. He explained during the review that "the scope of the studio was to anticipate a $190M rebuilding of the station, which is now in the RFP process. The goal was  to respond to NJ Transits’ desire to potentially leverage the investment for other private sector development around the station to revitalize the area following the principles of transit-oriented development." 

What I found most interesting about Professor Sollohub's studio presentations was his approach to presenting his student's work. Rather than having each student present live, his class pre-recorded a set of videos that focused on different stages of the studios' research, analysis, and design process. The final video presentation they titled "The Encore" provided further development of the semester's projects. Similar to Professor Theodore's studio, the work presented has the potential to impact the city and community directly. Part of Associate Professor Sollohub's studio included an opportunity for students to engage with stakeholders; many were present at the final review.

Other studios, like adjunct instructor and Associate at One Architecture & Urbanism, Justine Shapiro-Kline's, explored projects that dove into the post-carbon future of the city of Newark. She explained, "Our studio is titled How can Newark lead the way toward an equitable post-carbon future? This studio builds on the work we were doing last spring at the graduate level [...] Like the spring studio we used the Green New Deal legislation as a jumping-off point and we're asking, collectively "what kind of role can architecture play in realizing the Green New Deal?" Specifically, how can we respond to the urgent demands of decarbonizing, jobs and justice in the local context of the city of Newark?"

Shapiro added, "We had a great opportunity to link the work that we were doing to the city's ongoing master planning process. Through conversations with the team at the city planning level, Bloomberg Associates, and the consultant team, we were charged with exploring ideas and visions at the neighborhood scale to think about development in the coming decade. So we brought the two charges of the Green New Deal and the city master plan opportunity together within the structure of the studio."

Focusing on historic preservation and mixed-use building schemes, adjunct instructor, Assistant Director of the James Rose Center for Architectural Research and Design, and NJIT alumnus Kevin Hofmann’s studio, Common Ground II: James Street Commons, follows a previous summer studio that was research-based. He shares that the "genesis of both exercises was a request from the New Jersey Historic Preservation Office relayed to NJIT’s upper administration and the Hillier College asking us to take a critical look at the past, present, and future of Newark’s  James Street Commons Historic District."

Hofmann adds, "Our central investigations are: What is historic preservation, and what distinguishes or aligns this method of practice from/with other forms of creative design? Who determines what gets preserved? What are the socioeconomic drivers of preservation? What are the spatial consequences of preservation? What are the material implications of preservation?" Students during this studio presented a rich diversity of models and collages representing their mixed-use housing proposals for the site.

Adjunct instructor and principal of TUNA, Christopher Gardner, titled his studio Radical Addenda: Envisioning a Code for the Climate Crisis. It focused on "engaging both policy and vision equally, utilizing the building code itself as the mechanism for change and designing compelling visions of its implementations." According to Gardner, these radical addenda would be "formulated into hypothetical additions to the upcoming IBC 2021 code with the primary goal of addressing the climate crisis and reducing carbon in the atmosphere." Similarly, Associate Professor Taro Narahara's studio Transformable Places focused on speculative design solutions for climate action and urbanization. In this studio, Professor Narahara's goal was for students to explore new technologies and emerging materials, from mycelium to carbon nanotubes to space elevators.  Students were encouraged to research innovative ideas that "promote sustainability and seek solutions to predict climate change." Work presented during Professor Narahara's studio section also addressed contemporary cities' social and cultural issues.

Lastly, adjunct instructors Erin Pelligrino and Charlie Firestone (Founder/Principal and Partner of Matter, respectively) led a design/build studio that addresses the housing crisis with a deployable shelter prototype, with funding support of Tom Wisniewski, managing partner of Newark Venture Partners. For their studio, Shelter-In-Place, students poignantly addressed that homelessness is an ongoing social concern with root causes that are complex, "influenced by individual circumstances and societal structures." 

Fifteen undergraduate students in NJIT's architecture program have designed and built a prototype home that may be part of the solution to Newark’s housing crisis. The “tiny home” is approximately 8 feet by 12 feet and was designed to help address the city’s homeless population. "Shelter-In-Place" studio led by adjunct instructors Erin Pelligrino and Charlie Firestone. Video courtesy of NJIT Hillier College of Architecture and Design.

The students developed and built a “place of dwelling” (POD)  prototype to offer a "dignified shelter for homelessness." In addition, they aimed to create a design solution that could be replicated for production and responsive to climate concerns. A student shared, "the goal was to design a project that is stateless and can be implemented in a variety of locations throughout the city. Through the use of easily accessible materials and construction methods, we hope that this prototype can become a village or community that will help continue to fight homelessness in the city of Newark and beyond." Compared to the previous studios and projects, Professor Pelligrino and Professor Firestone's studio addressed design interventions for the city at a microscale. It was fitting that this studio concluded the days' Super Review, offering a "full-circle" overview of the curriculum taught this semester. 

The collaborative efforts between the school and the city of Newark have provided an impactful way for the students to understand their studio's curriculum in both theory and application. Anthony Schuman, Professor of Architecture at HCAD, had previously shared with the school that these opportunities for students create a transition from "theoretical studio instruction to real-world projects." Each studio that presented during the Super Review focused on sustainable initiatives that fostered engagement and social connectedness through careful and thoughtful research, assessment, and prototyping. 

Curriculum and pedagogy vary between schools of architecture. However, after attending NJIT’s  Super Review, it's clear that the school's commitment to fostering an environment for research and design, addressing climate change, and attention to civic engagement in the city of Newark enables strong design leaders.

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To learn more about the mission and work of the Newark Design Collaborative (NDC) click here. 

NJIT Hillier College of Architecture and Design offers a Bachelor of Architecture and Bachelor of Science in Architecture degree as well as three Masters programs (Master of Architecture, Master of Science in Architecture, and Master of Urban Design) as well as four graduate certificates. A Ph.D. program in Urban Systems is also offered by the College. To learn more about NJIT Hillier College of Architecture and Design and its program offerings click here.