NJSOA’s Student Edited Publication
Edited by Elizabeth Kowalchuk, Ayushi Shah, Dhruvi Rajpopat, Mary Riccio, and Nicolas Arango.
Kevin Hoffman, Faculty Advisor.
Copyright © 2021 Transect.
All rights reserved. Authors retain full use of their text and images without restriction.
Transect, its editors, and authors have made their best effort to obtain image rights for images contained herein not produced by the authors. All images are intended for academic use.
Inquiries may be emailed to transect.njit@gmail.com or mailed to Transect Attn: Weston Hall, Hillier College of Architecture and Design; 323 Dr. MLK, Jr. Blvd., New Jersey Institute of Technology, University Heights, Newark, NJ 07102.
The word “unprecedented” was commonly used over the past two years. While the transition to online classes to finish out the Spring semester of 2020 felt like a unique short term shift in the daily lives of students, the beginning of the Fall semester had a distinctly different feeling. First and second year students, who had yet to experience a full year of a “normal” college life, operated in a hybrid studio environment, meeting their critics virtually, but physically spread across Weston Hall in groups of 5-6 students to a classroom that usually became home to 15-20 students each. The third, fourth, and fifth year students conducted studio in an entirely virtual format. We became more and more desensitized to the global headlines that lit up our phones and the emails of Pandemic Recovery from our institution. It was easy to feel a lack of control in the mistakes it continues to make, and our world became warmer and more polarized. It was in this feeling of a lack of control that we found ourselves obsessed with our own agency.
Superstudio claimed that “architecture is one of the few ways to realise cosmic order on earth.” This became a guiding force and a mantra over the past two years of producing this publication. A reminder that as designers and as global citizens, we simultaneously own the agency to use architecture to take control and use our voice, while also recognizing the surrender of agency we must make through production. Through our studio explorations, we began to consider what it meant to give way to the shifting apertures of perspective that happen when a project is completed, when it becomes dissected and reinvented by the reader, the user, the occupant. Through this publication, we hoped to find our voice and to find peace in the lack of control.
Transect is the student-produced architectural journal of NJIT’s New Jersey School of Architecture. The publication seeks to contribute to and situate the school’s work within broader strands of contemporary architectural discourse by publishing student projects and essays as well as original essays by faculty, scholars, and practitioners.Contact
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