Announcements

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Date of lecture: November 11, 2026

Abstract

This year I completed three public art installations in Maplewood, New Brunswick, and Hackensack, each with its own scope, challenges, and rewards. When your artwork becomes work, how do you manage it as an artist? Let’s take a post-mortem look at the process from staying organized and working with arts organizations to engaging the community, and navigating the triumphs and pitfalls along the way.

Bio

Kate Eggleston is a multidisciplinary artist and educator.  Her studio practice serves as a dialogue between her personal experiences and a broader exploration of themes such as motherhood, Jewish culture, and folk tales, while working across paper, sculpture, and fiber.  She has attended artist residencies including Liquitex, the Elf School of the Arts, and Guttenberg Arts. She has exhibited primarily in the tri-state area including at the Montclair Art Museum, Artworks Trenton, TerraCycle, SMUSH Gallery, and the New Jersey State Museum.  She earned a BA in Visual Art, with a double major in Education, from Ramapo College in 2005. Beyond her studio practice, she has over 20 years of experience teaching artists of all ages and skill levels across a variety of mediums. She currently works as a Production Manager at StoneDog Studios, a woman-owned set and prop studio. She lives in central New Jersey with her husband, daughter, and dogs.

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Date of lecture: November 4, 2026

Abstract

Students are often positioned as recipients of knowledge, yet they actively produce, interpret, and transmit it through their research and design work. This became unmistakable as I moved through my own research. What began as a simple question about the decline of vernacular homes in Ghana quickly deepened into an inquiry about how indigenous knowledge systems are recognized, valued, and transmitted within design.

The long-standing marginalization of indigenous knowledge has reshaped communities’ ways of life, not only through Eurocentric ideologies, but also through the ways students and practitioners engage with these knowledge systems. This devaluation of the vernacular can begin in the classroom, where ways of building that deviate from perceived norms are often dismissed. We learn from professors, conduct research, interpret information, and produce work that enters a broader circulation of ideas, carrying consequences beyond the classroom. My thesis became a catalyst for examining this process, overturning many of my assumptions and revealing how knowledge is practiced, contested, and remembered.

Conversations with local builders revealed that adobe construction was far more labor-intensive than I assumed, while cement was often preferred for its modern appearance. These perspectives complicated my initial understanding of material decline and the disappearance of vernacular forms. They shifted the focus of my thesis from an investigation of materials toward a deeper questioning of knowledge itself: Who defines and values knowledge, and what happens when design frameworks determine what counts as legitimate?

These questions eventually intersected with Anita Bakshi’s work on landscape architecture pedagogy, not because our subjects aligned, but because both inquiries examined how knowledge is produced, transmitted, recognized, and taught. This epistemological connection created an unexpected opportunity for collaboration, pushing me to rethink my thesis and identify which perspectives were meaningful to contribute. The collaboration ultimately brought together two viewpoints: my perspective as a student and researcher and Anita’s as an educator and researcher, forming a dialogue between them.

I am not offering my experience as a formula for publication. Rather, I am urging fellow students to take their questions seriously, follow where they lead, pay attention to how those questions emerge through the work, and remain open to reinterpretation and collaboration. Essentially, consider what your research may become once the original project is finished.

Bio

Martha Afflu is a recent graduate of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Rutgers University, where she completed her BSLA and later her Master of Landscape Architecture. Her research focuses on colonial legacies, vernacular architecture, and Indigenous building knowledge systems, particularly within the Ashanti region of Ghana. Grounded in both disciplinary inquiry and her identity as a Ghanaian American with ethnic roots in the region, her graduate thesis examines how Western design frameworks often privilege modern materials, efficiency, and aesthetics while overlooking cultural resilience, ecological adaptation, and heritage continuity. Her work highlights the continuity of vernacular systems and practices not only as material traditions but also as ways of relating to land, labor, and cultural memory.

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Date of lecture: October 21, 2026

Abstract

“While the environmental and ecological benefits of creating a forest are obvious, the social benefits are underexplored. The RU Tree Planting Festival explored how to foster a culture of stewardship in a fun and interactive way, utilizing community participation to leverage social cohesion, environmental education, and connection to nature. While planting trees and creating a forest is very beneficial, it is important not to lose sight of celebrating the connection between those trees and the people who stand to benefit from them. This lecture will discuss the process and execution of creating the RU Tree Planting Festival, which brought 500 + people to campus to plant 3,000 trees.”

Bio

Josh Kover is a Landscape Architecture graduate student studying in the Urban Forestry Lab at Rutgers University. His master’s thesis is on the design and social influences of urban forest climate resiliency. Josh is an ISA-certified Arborist and was the owner of New Gen Garden: a sustainable landscaping and landscape design company. At Rutgers, he works with the University Landscape Architect to create a resilient, beautiful, and educational urban forest on campus. His work at Rutgers, IP & O and within the Urban Forestry Program allowed him to create and organize the RU Tree Planting Festival in April of 2026, where 550 people helped plant almost 3000 trees on the Rutgers campus.

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Date of lecture: October 14, 2026

Abstract

The Embankment is the massive stone section of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Harsimus Branch running parallel to 6th Street in Jersey City. The Embankment comprises six segments extending from Brunswick Street to Marin Boulevard on the east. This historic fabric, a remnant of the Industrial Revolution, is about to be adaptively repurposed as a linear park. Since its abandonment in 1999 there has been little or no access and a Novel Urban Forest has developed. Adapted to the dry rocky soils the existing vegetative assemblage is providing the foundation for the planning initiative. Rather than create a new planting plan, we chose to prioritize the mix of native and non-native species that have proven viable within the urban site.

A “light touch” is guiding the design of the Harsimus Branch from beginning to end. Design decisions, informed by Secretary of the Interior Standards, will preserve the historic integrity of the Embankment while concepts of 4th Nature target the improvement of ecosystem services. The ecosystem services have been characterized by a team from Rutgers University, School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. The Embankment Preservation Coalition formed in 1998 as a working group that evolved from meetings of more than a hundred neighbors who were concerned about a proposal to demolish the Harsimus Branch Embankment and develop the site. After many legal battles the property has been transferred to the City of Jersey City and the Coalition’s design team has developed Conceptual Open Space Plans.

Bio

Sean A. Gallagher is a Principal and the Director of Sustainable Design at Diller Scofidio + Renfro, as well as adjunct faculty at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. His past work includes the United States Olympic and Paralympic Museum, the U.S. Massena Land Port of Entry, and Microsoft’s “The Square” project. Most recently, Sean led the biofiltration system design for CanalCafé, which received the prestigious Golden Lion Award for Best National Participation at the 2025 Venice Biennale. He also served as Design Director for the David Rubenstein Forum in Chicago, which was named the 2022 Best Tall Tower Worldwide by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH).

Frank Gallagher, Ph.D. For over forty years Frank has explored the connection between people and landscape through both land management and academic research. Serving as Chief of Interpretive Services, Administrator and Assistant Director of the New Jersey Division of Parks and Forestry, offered practical experience in an array of land management issues. After teaching courses in biology, evolution and environmental science for ten years at Upsala College, Frank joined the faculty at Rutgers The State University part time in 1994 and full time in 2012. With over 60 publications in both scientific journals and venues of general interests, Frank strongly believes in the value of written communication and has published topics ranging from phytostabilization of contaminated soils to the ethics of ecosystem function monetization.

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Date of lecture: October 7, 2026

Abstract

This talk traces recent hurricane relief and rebuilding efforts in the Caribbean to demonstrate how disaster recovery has become a highly contested and political terrain. I reflect on my ongoing work in the eastern Caribbean, and a growing regional body of critical disaster scholarship, to demonstrate how disaster recovery efforts intersect with issues around race, coloniality and land-based struggles. I situate regional discourses on climate change and climate justice within a broader politico-cultural context that foregrounds the current climate crisis as an extension of a colonial past that continues to shape the region’s subordinate position in an uneven world system. A situation that illustrates how the Caribbean’s disproportionate vulnerability to the adverse effects of a changing climate cannot be separated from the historical conditions and logics that brought about the contemporary world and Western modernity. I close by offering insights into island ‘survivalism’ within a context of growing global climate uncertainty and ongoing post/colonial struggles. In resituating mainstream discourses on the Anthropocene from the purview of the Caribbean, I hope to raise critical questions regarding the political, historical, and onto-epistemic assumptions/logics that undergird contemporary debates around the global climate crisis and its attendant solutions. I draw from decolonial scholarship and the Black Radical Tradition, to develop a basis for using catastrophe as a foundational starting point to theorize, resist and imagine radically new worlds and ways of being amidst the enduring conditions brought on by irreversible climate-linked losses.

Bio

Kevon Rhiney is an Associate Professor of Geography at Rutgers University and Director of the Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies. He is currently an Honorary Research Fellow for the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES) at the University of the West Indies. Current research explores the intersection of climate change, development, and justice, focusing on how historically marginalized communities in the Caribbean and Central America navigate climate-linked socio-ecological shocks. Dr. Rhiney received his doctorate in geography at the University of the West Indies and pursued his postdoctoral studies at the University of Oxford under a British Commonwealth Fellowship. He is an elected Fellow of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) and currently serves as a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Seventh Assessment Report.

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This lecture is in-person only.
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Date of lecture: September 9, 2026

The Rutgers Public Design Internship Program placed eleven students at workplaces around the country to contribute to public design projects and community engagement. The purpose of the internship is not simply to give students opportunities to practice design; the intention is to expand what they understand ‘design’ to mean through real public work and community engagement.

Placements ranged from American Samoa to Puerto Rico, Atlanta, Newark, New Brunswick, NYC, and Philadelphia. Students worked in a wide range of professional settings, including design offices, such as Marvel Designs and NYC Parks, Trust for Public Land offices, a large public park, and a municipal parks and recreation department. We will also hear about an LAF Case Study for a Queens nature reserve.

Across these varied settings, students encountered aspects of landscape architecture that extended well beyond producing drawings. Through working with communities, clients, public agencies, and design professionals, they developed a broader understanding of what design skills entail—and how design can be used to listen, engage, collaborate, and respond to complex public needs. More than just something that you make, design is something you do with people, places, and communities.

Students reflect on how their understanding of design and their own emerging professional identities changed through this work. The internships offered not simply an opportunity to practice drawing and design, but transformative learning experiences in which students discovered new ways of seeing, thinking, collaborating, and making a difference through landscape architecture.

Speakers

• Gene Sinnung, Karessa Falcon-Jiminez: Marvel International, Puerto Rico
• Logan Chin, Natalie Mufalli: Trust for Public Land, Atlanta
• Bella Hoy: Trust for Public Land, Philadelphia
• Phoebe Chou: Perez Planning + Design, virtual office
• Maddie Bideaux: Branch Brook Park, Newark
• Annaya Syed: NYC Parks, NYC
• Saanvi Bhattarai: Rutgers University Landscape Architect’s Office, New Brunswick
• Lola Wong: Parks and Recreation, American Samoa
• Brooke Belmonte: LAF Case Study, Queens, NYC

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Date of Lecture: September 23, 2026

DeBoer Travel Prize

The Roy DeBoer Prize winners will speak about their travels.

About the Prize
“Roy passionately believed that students should have an educational travel experience as undergraduates. For many years he led summer study-abroad courses for the department and saw the profound impact that travel has on the appreciation and study of landscape architecture. To encourage students to develop their own independent study-travel experiences, he founded and supported through his gifts a competitive Landscape Architecture Travel Prize that awards a stipend to help underwrite an educational trip.” Read more about Roy DeBoer.

Summer Praxis Studio in Puerto Rico

The study abroad design studio just concluded its 5-week travel program that combined experiential learning through research, discussion, documentation and design. Students from Landscape Architecture, Planning and Engineering, along with students form the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico and la Universidad Ana G Mendez experienced and engaged residents, professionals and a diversity of ecologies to understand climatic and resilient challenges to design.

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Date of Lecture: November 18, 2026

Abstract

Wolfram Hoefer’s new book Suburban Cultural Landscapes: Planning and Design for Place Identity investigates the concept of cultural landscape and its role for planning and design in the suburban context. The presentation will highlight how suburban settlement patterns in the U.S. and in Europe have been shaped by two very different suburban narratives: the American Dream narrative of individualistic suburban dwellers versus the European Rural Village narrative of the inherited cultural landscape. Suburban development in four metropolitan regions are analyzed and compared: Vienna/Austria, Budapest/Hungary, the Ruhr Region in Germany, and New Jersey’s Northeast Corridor. These regions have in common the fact that land use decisions are based on principles of property ownership in capitalist economic systems within a democratic framework. However, there are also differences: The American suburb forms a culturally distinct zone between city and open landscape. This suburban zone is smaller around Budapest and Vienna, where the countryside (conceived as an idealized cultural landscape) starts right at the urban edge. Similarities in settlement patterns between New Jersey and the Ruhr Region are shown to be related to industrial development. These different cultural narratives impact land use planning and design approaches on cultural landscapes within the suburban context.

Bio

Dr. Wolfram Hoefer is a Professor at the Rutgers Department of Landscape Architecture. He received is doctoral degree from the TU München and serves as Director of the Rutgers Center for Urban Environmental Sustainability (CUES). He developed numerous community outreach projects in the field of adaptive re-use of brownfields, urban resiliency, and infrastructure.

His current research explores underlying cultural narratives that shape planning and design approaches to cultural landscapes within the suburban context. He is lead editor (with Arianna Lindberg, Angela Oberg, Sebastian Schlecht, and Frank Gallagher) of the book: Climate Bridge. An international perspective on how to enact climate action at the government public interface. Rutgers University Press 2025. His theoretical research goes hand in hand with community outreach. Recent projects include Middlesex County Cultural Landscape and Ecosystems Service Plan, New Brunswick Parks Action Plan, and advising Drumthwacket Foundation on restoration and long-term management of Drumthwacket Estate, the official residence of the governor of New Jersey in Princeton.

Dr. Hoefer has lectured at national and international conferences and academic institutions. Among his honors are the 2021 Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture National Teaching Award and a 2018 NJASLA Merit Award, Landscape Planning from the New Jersey Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects. Web Page: Wolfram Hoefer – Rutgers Center for Urban Environmental Sustainability at Rutgers SEBS

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Date of Lecture: September 16, 2026

Abstract

Creativity thrives on curiosity, experimentation, and play. Discover how art, making, and playful thinking can spark fresh ideas, strengthen collaboration, and inspire new approaches to teaching, research, design, and everyday challenges. Together we will explore simple, accessible practices that can help cultivate a more creative life at work and beyond. 

Bio

Megan Lotts is an artist, educator, and visionary academic librarian whose work reimagines libraries as dynamic spaces for creativity, connection, and play. She is the author of The Playful Library: Building Environments for Learning and Creativity (2024) and Advancing a Culture of Creativity in Libraries: Programming and Engagement (2021). As Art Librarian and faculty at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Lotts brings an interdisciplinary approach to librarianship by blending scholarly research, art, and imagination to create inclusive and inspiring learning environments. She collaborates across the visual arts, humanities, landscape architecture, and other disciplines, supporting faculty and students through research instruction, creative programming, and innovative collection development. Widely recognized for her pioneering work advancing creativity and play in academic libraries, Lotts’s scholarship explores how maker culture, experiential learning, and hands-on exploration can transform information spaces into living laboratories for innovation. Through her teaching, research, and artistic practice, she invites people to engage with art in unexpected and participatory ways, reflecting her belief that libraries are not only repositories of knowledge but also catalysts for collaboration, experimentation, and joy. 

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Date of Lecture: September 30, 2026

Bio

Brian Phillips, FAIA, is Founder and Creative Director of ISA, an urbanism and architecture practice based in Philadelphia, as well as Executive Director of Meantime, a nonprofit dedicated to activating vacant urban spaces through community-driven programming. Recently, Meantime on Market brought six pop-up businesses — from a record shop to a vintage furniture store — to the long-vacant storefronts of Market East, in partnership with the Center City District. For over 25 years, Brian has led award-winning projects spanning experimental housing, adaptive reuse, and civic infrastructure — including Cherry Street Pier, the 100K Houses, and Ambler Yards — that treat design as a tool for urban resilience. He is a Pew Fellow in the Arts, an Architectural League Emerging Voice, and teaches a graduate urban housing studio at the University of Pennsylvania.

Abstract

Cities have always balanced the accumulation of wealth and power with the production of culture and community — and that balance has historically depended on face-to-face human interaction. As screen-mediated life erodes the conditions that made cities both equitable and vital, what does it mean to design for the city for everyone? Drawing on nearly three decades of work in Philadelphia — from affordable housing and civic space to turning vacant storefronts into cultural laboratories — Brian Phillips will examine how design and advocacy can resist the flattening of urban life and hold our cities to a higher human standard.