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theses

For more than two hundred years, land management has often entailed using a tabla rasa approach, through which the landscape has been successively manipulated to prepare it for reuse. Alternately adding and erasing layers has modified the landscape, often irreparably. While efficient and cost-effective, this tactic dismisses the concept of the landscape as an abstract field of operation and, instead, considers it a product that is meant to be exploited. But this method does not account for the phenomenon of accumulation that occurs through its historical evolution. In the early 1940s, the U.S. military embraced the tenets of this civil engineering approach in order to efficiently mobilize in preparation for engagement in World War II. In Piscataway, this approach was manifest in the development of Camp Kilmer, one of the first and largest staging areas on domestic soil. Representing an historic departure from traditional military development, the site would eventually be acquired by Rutgers University for its Livingston Campus, which employed a similar approach of clearance to prepare for its new campus’ construction. But by retaining the Camp’s infrastructure and a dozen original buildings, the university has inadvertently retained visible, yet unattributed evidence of the landscape’s cultural strata. In many ways, university planners and contemporary landscape practitioners are grappling with the same challenge: how to determine the best way to reuse an urban landscape. Are we, as inhabitants of this land, destined to repeat the cycle of erasing and rewriting the “ancient script of the soil,” at all costs, as André Corboz suggests? Or are there other alternatives that could be explored that would prevent erasure of our past in our quest for modernity? I posit that there is an opportunity with the former Camp Kilmer site on Rutgers’ Livingston Campus to preserve the site’s cultural legacy in a way that recognizes its historical importance, creates connections within the campus and community at large, and integrates the academic mission of Rutgers University.

ETD_8922

M.L.A.

Includes bibliographical references

by Kimberly A. Tryba

doi:10.7282/T3280C1G

ETD graduate

The author owns the copyright to this work.