Volume 5 Editors’ Note
Jacob Swanson, Dhruvi Rajpopat, Daniel Girgis, Fatima Fardos, & Jimenna Alcantar2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the New Jersey School of Architecture. Originally begun in 1973 with a progressive embrace of the potential of digital technologies for design, the school has established itself as an important institution in New Jersey. At this important milestone for the institution of which it is a part, Transect has taken the opportunity to engage with the question of architectural pedagogy simply: why and how do we teach architecture? As sustainability challenges demand attention, advances in artificial intelligence (and technology generally) abound, disciplinary boundaries break down into transdisciplinarity, space ephemeralizes into the virtual, culture fractures into cultures, and technologically-enabled methods of work change the function of the city, architectural education (and architecture) demands new conceptions, approaches, and goals.
Much as architectural history provides a foundation from which architects engage current issues of building, Transect Volume 5 looks back over the last half-century of the school in order to speculate on the future of architectural pedagogy more broadly. In creating this temporal pedagogical transect, we culminate the investigations of the previous four issues.
Volume 5 also marks a transition for Transect itself, both in publication form and ambition. As a student-produced publication, we are dedicated to both bringing contemporary architectural discourse to NJSOA’s student body and providing a platform for students to begin to contribute to it themselves. We believe that at a professional school located at a polytechnic university, it is imperative that architectural education extend beyond the narrow confines of technical preparation and allow students to develop their own position on the nature and potentialities of the discipline.
By providing a place for the various strands of thought to come together, Transect is an attempt to extend these conversations, deepening the college’s engagement with itself and the broader world. Volume 5 begins that quest.
Jacob Swanson, Dhruvi Rajpopat, Daniel Girgis, Fatima Fardos, and Jimenna Alcantar are pursuing Bachelors of Architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. They are editors of Transect Volume 5: Pedagogy.