Sally Week: A Day of Revitalization

The Lehigh Gap Nature Center: http://lgnc.org/ Day two was a day of difficult terrain. The class traveresed up the mountainside of a superfund site. This location, once barren, had been brought back to life and is now a thriving parkland with many trails. Of these trails the one up over the ridge is quite spectacular but physically draining. The superfund site, ie the Lehigh…

Sally Week: Day on the Water

  ReTURN The Favor: http://returnthefavornj.org/ Day one focused on shorelines and water-based ecosystems. We were scheduled to visit three locations. The first a farm protected by dams and dikes built all around it. The second a shoreline protected for the variety of species it is home to. The third a unique area, a mix between commerce and parkland centered around crabbing and shellfish. The…

LARPERS: Winterthur

Winterthur: https://www.winterthur.org/ Winterthur, originally a private estate, is now a museum and garden. The grounds are extensive holding a number of different gardens and amusement spaces. While we were there a portion of the grounds were being set up for some sort of summer fair. To give a sense of scale, the fairground activity could not be detected from the gardens we visited. I…

Petty’s Island Cleanup

Petty’s Island: https://nj.gov/dep/njnlt/pettysisland.htm Camden County Historical Society: https://www.cchsnj.org/ A well spent Saturday morning was recently dedicated to joining a clean up effort on Petty’s Island with a studio friend Miriam. This island is located between Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Pennsauken, New Jersey. It is also positioned just across from our most recent studio design site. The cleanup lasted 2 hours with a team of roughly…

LARPERS Spring Outing

Halka Nurseries: https://www.halkanursery.com/our-trees/ The weather is finally turning around and the LARPERS are getting restless. As the sun stays out longer and the temperatures get warmer the syllabus reflects the change and field trips start popping up in the schedule. Tuesdays are getting exciting. First field trip of the semester we went to Halka Nurseries. This was a unique trip as we were able…

Eastern State Pennitentiary

https://www.easternstate.org/ Originally designed as a terrifying prison aimed to inspire pentinance in it’s prisoners, this pennitentiary is now a museum aiming to bring attention to the reality of prison, the various prison types, and the implications of the prison system. This museum is eye opening in several ways. The first is obvious, waking up the public to the reality of crime statistics, the impacts…

Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens

Home This place lies somewhere between rubble and art. At first glance it is an overwhelming series of walls of concrete and mostly glass. But the more you walk through this installation the more captivating it becomes. Each walk through reveals a new statue previously unnoticed, a unique perspective into a space below, or a fun phrase hidden in all the tiling. The website…

Pittsburgh: A Day in the City

Pittsburgh, a city of bridges, the place where three rivers meet, is a lovely city to stroll through on a day off. As nice as the city is the trip there takes some planning and time. The trip is roughly 5 hours by car, 7 hours by train, and 1.5 hours by plane. I took the train as the time on the train can…

City Views

  When you’re phone gets full and you have to clear up space you find little gems. These photos are just a few taken on my walks to and from studio looking towards downtown Philadelphia. Each of these views came with very different weather patterns. Some look deceptively cold while others warm but in reality the look of the sky has almost nothing to…

A Landscape Tour: Chanticleer Garden

Chanticleer Gardens: http://www.chanticleergarden.org/ What better way to spend a saturday than visiting a local garden? None. This trip was organized by the Landscape Architecture Department and allowed 30 students the opportunity to engage in a private tour of the gardens led by two of the gardens staff and OLIN partner\Penn alumnus Dennis McGlade. Chanticleer is a pleasure garden. It’s sole purpose is to be…