PROJECT NARRATIVE
Landscape history is often cast as a specialized undertaking, an accessory activity removed from the innovative concerns of contemporary design practice. The research project “Collective Visions” challenges that assumption using a series of case studies to illustrate how historical research can function as both a cross-disciplinary fact-finding activity that selects and organizes information, and a revelatory action that shapes our vision of the land. The case studies inventively blend archival historiography, popular culture, oral histories, science, and big data using timeline chronologies, montage juxtaposition, and network linkages. The resultant products raise intriguing questions about the way designers translate, prioritize and combine cross-disciplinary knowledge in order to create new patterns of inference.
Project Methodology
“Collective Visions” began modestly in the first case study using historical research to explore sense of place – a concept defined as much by memory and identity as by objective reality. However, as the case studies progressed in scale and ambition the historical research likewise grew in scale and ambition, and borrowed heavily from the layered readings of the landscape pioneered in the mid-twentieth century and advanced with geographic information systems. But unlike typical layering systems, which capture specific moments in time, this project’s layered approach blends synchronic and diachronic readings of the landscape to visualize how the threads of history intertwine and reverberate across time and space. It is our contention that this approach more thoroughly communicates multiple agendas, which in turn provides designers and their audiences with the background necessary to understand the historical contingencies of design proposals. The strength of this methodology lies in its ability to allow material drawn from the past to narrate different stories. As a design tool, it is generative without being prescriptive.
Each case study incorporates a multilayered timeline consisting of a broad collection of historical information illustrated through chronological facts and imagery. The visual layering reveals causal linkages that unite seemingly disparate, and often contradictory social, economic and environmental phenomena. Though the information contained in the layered timeline is nominally valueless, like any attempt at historical narrative it clearly sanctions some voices over others, which makes the work as much about personal interest and provocation as it is about research methodology, factual historiography, or the visualization of information. As such, "Collective Visions" forces viewers to confront, and question, normative suppositions and values, including the way these suppositions and values inflect our actions toward the land. But perhaps most important, the research illustrates how cross-disciplinary explorations of landscape history can generate visually enticing products that are meaningful to design professionals and academics, and accessible to the general public.
Case Study 1: Vineland, New Jersey: Narratives of Nature, Nurture and Industry
Research Statement: Using John McPhee’s cultural history of the New Jersey Pinelands as a point of reference, this study combined archival research, discourse analysis and oral history to explore the cultural narratives of Vineland, New Jersey.
Research Sources: Library of Congress photographic holdings; local archives and oral histories.
Case Study 2: What Exit? The Interchange Landscape of the New Jersey Turnpike
Research Statement: Navigating the byways of cultural geography, this study explores the physical and social landscape of the New Jersey Turnpike interchange exit and its relationship to technology, toll collection, and surveillance.
Research Sources: New Jersey Turnpike archives, annual reports, and as-built drawings.
Case Study 3: Welcome to Asbury Park
Research Statement: Using Asbury Park, New Jersey, a beach community made famous by the rock and roll icon Bruce Springsteen, as a prototypical example, this study of context and chronology explores layered timelines as a means to visualize the complex physical and cultural history of the New Jersey shore.
Research Sources: historic geology maps and weather data; census data; the Asbury Park Press and Monmouth county archives; the Asbury Park Historic Society; newspaper microfilm, environmental studies of technology, climate change and sea level rise.
Case Study 4: Drawn From History: Envisioning the Future of Roosevelt, New Jersey
Research Statement: Done in conjunction with a landscape design studio, this case study explores the ability of layered timelines to promote different, but intertwined readings of the past, and thus different but related ideas for the future. The results of this exploration and its imaginative new visions begin with a comprehensive multilayered time line.
Town History: Originally known as Jersey Homesteads, Roosevelt, New Jersey was one of ninety-nine Subsistence Communities created by the federal government during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. Following provisions of the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act, these communities sought to improve living standards through the provision of housing and subsistence agriculture, and the decentralization of industry. Jersey Homesteads was unique, however, in that it was the only Subsistence Homestead established for urban Jewish garment workers, many of who were committed socialists.
Under the guidance of the Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant Benjamin Brown, Jersey Homesteads included a cooperative clothing factory, farm, and distribution facilities. Half of the town’s 1,2000 acres were reserved for farming; the other half contained ½-acre housing lots, a school and cemetery, and a modern factory and water and sewer plants. The Bauhaus-trained architect Alfred Kastner, with the help of his assistant Louis Kahn, prepared architectural plans. The photographers Dorothea Lange and Russell Lee documented the town’s construction. In conjunction with these efforts, the artist Ben Shahn, working under the auspices of the Public Works Administration, painted a mural for the school. The mural depicted the cultural heritage of the town’s residents, the high ideals of its cooperative vision, and the pragmatics of its design. Shahn subsequently purchased one of the town’s flat-roofed, cinder block homes, which led to an influx of New York artists, photographers and musicians. In 1936, the factory and thirty-five homes opened to great fanfare. Yet, within two years the cooperative ventures failed. Despite this setback, the town remained a close-knit community held together by shared custom and its isolated location. In November of 1945, following the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the resident’s renamed their community Roosevelt, New Jersey. Less than a year later, however, the federal government announced plans to divest all Subsistence Homestead projects. By 1947 the town was no longer affiliated with the federal government.
In 1991, concerned that suburban sprawl would impact the town the community prepared an application that placed Roosevelt on the National Register of Historic Places. The subsequent creation of a land trust led to the preservation of the original agricultural open space. The question that remained unanswered, and what the studio addressed, was how to move forward without negating the rich legacy of the past.
Research Sources: Library of Congress archival material, Borough of Roosevelt Historical Collection Rutgers University, personal interviews, environmental reports, and site visits.
