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Graduate Theses and Projects

Martha Afflu (2026)

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Vernacular Place, Ecology, and Culture: Reinterpreting Ghana’s Indigenous Building Legacy for Landscape Resilience.

Ceramic relief map of the Ashanti Region, created using clay to represent the relationship between land, culture, and material knowledge. The prominent vein running across the map represents the tension and negotiation between modern and Indigenous practices and systems, while the piece reflects the cultural heritage and resilience embedded within the landscape.

ABSTRACT

What does the increasing reliance of the contemporary landscape architecture field on permanence and material substitution reveal when modernized materials are consistently privileged over Indigenous and local building knowledge that has existed and functioned for generations? This tension extends beyond a single geography and reflects a broader global shift away from vernacular architecture and Indigenous construction practices. This thesis pivots to Ghana in West Africa, specifically the Ashanti Region, where it investigates the shifting role of earth-based construction and the use of local materials. To situate this inquiry, the research examines comparative case studies in Switzerland, Rwanda, and Indigenous North America.

Through this comparative analysis, it becomes evident that material hierarchies are shaped less by technical performance and more by perception, cost structures, labor valuations, capital, developmental models, and aesthetic bias. Switzerland demonstrates the impact of institutional support, Rwanda reflects post-genocide national rebranding, and Indigenous North America reclaims building knowledge as an act of sovereignty. Across all sites, shifts in material narratives depend on who holds the authority to define progress and value.

Returning to the Ashanti Region, this thesis examines sites including Bonwire, Manhyia Palace, Anhwiaso, Lake Bosomtwe, and Kejetia Market, understanding these landscapes not as isolated examples but as layered reflections of history and heritage. These spaces reveal how material choices become negotiations between aspiration, legacy, and imposed systems.

Ultimately, this thesis reframes material as relational rather than purely structural or aesthetic. It challenges prevailing design precedents and calls for a maintenance-aware, stewardship-centered discipline. It argues that design education and professional practice shape how materials are valued, how landscapes are produced, and how cultural systems are either negotiated with or overwritten. In response, this thesis proposes redefining the precedent of landscape architecture, prioritizing relational practice over industrial aspiration..

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.

Josh Kover (2026)

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Advancing Urban Silviculture: Exploring Urban Forest Climate Resiliency through Social and Design Influences

Dozens of Participants at the Rutgers University Tree Planting Festival planting small trees, creating a Miyawaki Forest together in Piscataway, NJ.
While one person can plant some trees, it takes a village to plant a forest.

About the Thesis

Within a climate change context, the desired value of urban trees as essential infrastructure drives management that focuses less on the quantity of plantings and more on the quality of plantings, as well as advocacy for preservation. Urban forestry coupled with a silviculture framework that focuses on the people who control the composition, structure, and health of a city’s urban canopy can help create a resilient urban forest. This paper explores tree-literate design, the roles of different landowners, how to create a culture of stewardship, the Rutgers University Tree Planting Festival, and a vision for urban silviculture. With harsher growing conditions and population growth, urban forestry decision-makers need to plan for and recognize the fact that everybody has a crucial role to play in urban forest climate resiliency.

About the Author

Josh Kover is a graduate of the Rutgers University Landscape Architecture program who studied in the Urban Forestry Lab. Josh is an ISA-certified Arborist and was the owner of New Gen Garden: a sustainable landscaping and landscape design company. At Rutgers, he worked 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 about 550 people helped plant almost 3000 trees on the Rutgers campus. Josh’s goal upon graduating is to continue to experiment with how to create a culture of stewardship within urban forestry that leverages beauty, storytelling, gathering, and magic to connect people to their trees and land.  

Sachi Patel (2025)

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Mapping Movement/ Erasing the Line
Delaware River and Its Tributaries

Abstract of the Thesis

Rivers are often represented as fixed lines on maps, yet they are dynamic, ever-changing
systems that defy such rigid boundaries. This design project challenges the conventional
delineation of rivers by interrogating the visual and physical lines that define them.
Inspired by the work of Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, it explores how fixed
borders do not confine rivers but rather exist as fluid, evolving entities shaped by
topography, hydrology, vegetation, and human actions.

To achieve this objective, the project employs multiple visualization technique
that include GIS analysis, photography transects, relative elevation models (REMs),
sectional representations of water levels, digital collage, and a layered three-dimensional
model. The resulting representations challenge the notion of a singular linear boundary,
instead highlighting the network of interactions between water, land, and human presence
that continuously shape and redefine the landscape of a river. Through this visual lens,
this design project underscores the need to adopt a more nuanced and adaptive
understanding of river systems that move beyond the constraints of traditional linear
mapping.

The site for this exploration includes the Lehigh River, the Rancocas River, the
Schuylkill River, and the Brandywine River, all of which are tributaries of the Delaware
River that exhibit different physiographic conditions and different levels of human
intervention.

Ana Maria Oliynyk (2025)

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Rendered scene brick apartment buildings in background. Courtyard with curved low retaining structures for trees and flowers. Silhouettes of people sitting and walking dog.

The project employs research, visual documentation, and design to explore opportunities for connecting people to nature within the built, densely populated urban environment. While the concept of green space is very vast, this thesis focuses on a garden typology, situated in the context of urban green space. Photographic documentation and analysis of “successful” green spaces and gardens in New York City and Switzerland serves to inform what makes for “good design” in urban green spaces, and apply findings to the context of the urban public garden.

The elements identified in this thesis as the fabric of “good design” are applied to a design exercise of the urban public garden in the context of a courtyard at the Kingsborough Houses public housing complex in Brooklyn, New York. The design serves as a visual application and extrapolation of findings, taking the elements of what makes for good design from abstraction to a working concept.
Looking forward, the ideas explored in this thesis project are a lifelong learning process, and the urban public courtyard garden design application is but a starting point for exploration and future work towards the goal of designing urban green spaces to connect urban dwellers to nature.

Sean Murray (2025)

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Critical Regionalism in Landscape Architecture:
Re-Design of Papiamento Restaurant (Aruba)

About the Project

This project was born out of the search for a means of developing an authentic design for region that I am not familiar with. The author’s goal is to ultimately work in the design field in the Caribbean, particularly Aruba, but he recognizes that there is a significant American bias in his view of design. In his study of design history, he became aware of the theory of Critical Regionalism. The more he learned about it, the more it became evident that it might be a good way into design in a foreign culture.

Critical Regionalism is an architectural theory that emerged in the 1980s as a reaction to the universalization and globalization of architectural styles and the homogenization of building appearances. It is also a response to the ‘kitschiness’ of many Regionalism designs, which tend to evoke cliché images of times gone by, without any consideration of the meaning or tectonics behind the architectural features.

The study site, Papiamento Restaurant, is a well known restaurant on the island of Aruba. The original house was built on the site in 1866 by a Venezualan man and a Dutch woman for use as an agricultural property. Over the past 160 years, the site has seen several uses and many incremental changes and improvements. It is through this study of the impact of culture and climate on design, that the author has produced a plan for what the next rendition of the site might be.

About the Author

Sean is completing his masters in Landscape Architecture. Prior to returning to school, he founded and operated a landscape design/build firm, Nature’s Apprentice LLC. The firm specializes in high-end residential projects, particularly those involving swimming pools. At the time of the sale of the company at the end of 2021, the company had grown to over 25 employees working all over New Jersey. With close to 30 years of design/build experience, Sean brought a significant amount of construction knowledge to his studies. He has an BA in Economics from Rutgers, as well as an AAS in English Composition and an Undergraduate Certificate in Ornamental Horticulture from Brookdale CC.

Sean’s goal upon graduating is to become licensed in the field and work for a large international design firm, where he can continue to gain experience developing designs in foreign cultures and climates. He is currently working as a freelance design and construction management consultant.