Kevin Hoffman, Faculty Advisor.
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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.
of Transect. Beginning this project as first year architecture students in
“CoAD,” (College of Architecture and Design), we had no idea the signifi can’t changes we would be facing over the next five years of our B.Arch careers. In our second year, the school received a new name and acronym, HCAD, and we were sent home to complete our spring semester remotely as the
COVID-19 pandemic began to spread across the country, with our home state of New Jersey hit early and hard. We welcomed our new writers and editors through virtual meetings and hosted “Studio Rant Sessions,” in hopes of staying connected. This trend continued into our third year, where our younger members occupied Weston Hall studios in groups of three, spread out across the rooms that would normally hold hundreds of rowdy students.
Our fourth year welcomed a full return for NJIT students to Newark, the city we all saw as home despite the inconsistency of the past two years. Thi return is documented and celebrated in this publication, which,
for the first time, covers the entire range of the B.Arch program from core
years to options studios. We looked at all of these studio projects through
the lens of context. Many studio briefs placed their projects within our
home city of Newark, and many of the options studios went even further and
engaged with the city in community serving designs, both imagined and
built. As our founding members now approach the completion of their
educational careers at NJIT, this publication should be read as a celebration of context, and particularly, as a love letter to our city of Newark.