Aqueous Grounds: New College, Florida

Advisors: Ted Brown, Aurélie Frolet

“Aqueous Grounds” presents the New College Challenge as the site of inquiry for projects across category, scale, and time. The Challenge asks students from five universities across disciplines to rethink the future of New College, a
progressive liberal arts school located on the gulf coast of Florida, at the time of its centennial. At the sponsor’s invitation, Syracuse Architecture will project possible futures through the student work of this advisory group. Students are funded to visit the college early in the spring semester and participate in an exhibition in May 2023.

New College is a small honors college for the State University System of Florida. Since its inception in 1920/1960, the college has fostered an experimental pedagogical approach wherein students develop their own multidisciplinary course of study. Within this framework, students are encouraged to investigate the world around them using non-traditional methods to encourage experimentation and nurture curiosity. On its centennial, the college is revisiting its tenets as it prepares itself to face the urgencies of ecological crisis, climate change and rising sea level. The goals include: “Re-imagining the campus and its built and natural environments to better support and inspire the campus and Sarasota-Bradenton, Florida, communities; providing spaces and places to grow its alternative learning paradigm for training future generations of unconventional thinkers and leaders; and offering a distinct approach to liberal arts education predicated on applied learning and research that engages partners to help address global challenges that will shape the latter part of the 21st century.”

Students will pursue areas of interest that may range from the future of the American campus to design in response to sea level rise. Scales of intervention may range from urban design to landscape installations but must address the threat and potential of water in research and architectural design. In the fall semester, students research ecology, pedagogy, territory, town, landscape, and case studies in the context of the New College Challenge, resulting in a shared volume of research. In the spring semester, students will produce individual or team proposals for New College - on aqueous ground. How can architecture, in the way that it relates to ecology, facilitate novel learning opportunities in the experimental framework of New College? In turn, how might this Challenge foster experimental design thinking towards possible futures? Students at New College are available to assist in our research efforts and we will have access to professional and academic advisors across disciplines throughout the two-semester sequence.

MONDAY, MAY 1, 1 - 4 pm, room 402

Internal Critics: Godlewski, Kerner