Knowlton School

10/02/2026

Knowlton School Student Organization Highlight:
City and Regional Planning Student Association

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The City and Regional Planning Student Association (CRPSA) is the Knowlton School’s student organization for students interested in urban planning, design, and policy. Their mission is to build community, expand professional networks, and connect members directly with the planning industry.

CRPSA offers access to alumni connections, career development, and student membership in the American Planning Association.

All majors are welcome, and there is no fee to join. Follow .crpsa on Instagram for updates and upcoming events.

This year’s CRPSA Executive Board includes: Stephanie McCauley, President; Aubri Hoop, Vice President; Hannah Sabagh, Assistant Vice President; Hyunseo Kim, Treasurer; Krish Harsha, Assistant Treasurer; Sebastian Reese, Secretary; Courtney Adam, Events Chair; Isabel George, Events Chair; Kausila Subedi, Events Chair; Emily Halperin, Communications; Evie Chermonte, Communications; and Taylor Mason, Communications.

10/01/2026

Through signs, images, newspaper articles, yearbook spreads, sculptures, and architecture, the community in and around Ohio State has long claimed that sites on campus bear the physical traces of the Underground Railroad.

Associate Professor of Architecture Karen Lewis, who has worked on mapping and other visualizations of the wider Underground Railroad, found those claims interesting—and surprising. Now, through BETHA-funded research, Lewis has filled in the historical record and brought her disciplinary expertise to some of those claims.

We spoke with Lewis about architectural forensics, Ohio’s “Underground Railroad imaginary,” and the complex interaction of the historical record and community self-image.

Read the full interview
https://knowlton.osu.edu/news/2026/09/forensic-approach-architecture-visualizing-underground-railroad?utm_campaign=eng_marketing-activity_fy27&utm_content=1790883961&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

09/28/2026

THIS WEDNESDAY!

The Baumer Lecture Series continues this Wednesday, September 30, at 5:30 p.m. in the Gui Auditorium with Gonzalo Cruz of AECOM.

Gonzalo Cruz is a design principal for New York and leads AECOM’s Landscape Architecture and Urban Design (LAUD) practice.

Cruz’s work brings together landscape architecture, urban design, and community engagement to create resilient and inclusive public spaces.

Cruz has led the design of award-winning projects including Liberty Park at the World Trade Center, the Lower Manhattan Coastal Resilience Master Plan, Sendero Verde in East Harlem, and the South Battery Park City Resiliency Project, including the transformation of Wagner Park.

Read more at
https://knowlton.osu.edu/events/2026/09/baumer-lecture-series-gonzalo-cruz?utm_campaign=eng_marketing-activity_fy27&utm_content=1790621581&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

09/25/2026

Book Talk
Reconstructors: Land, Work, and Engineering After the Civil War
OCT 8 / 4 PM
Knowlton Hall, Big Stairs

Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture John Dean Davis has published Reconstructors: Land, Work, and Engineering After the Civil War. The book explores the transformation of the landscape by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during Reconstruction.

Davis will discuss the book on OCT 8 at 4 PM on Knowlton Hall's Big Stairs. This event is co-sponsored by the Environmental History Initiative and the Knowlton School.

https://knowlton.osu.edu/events/2026/10/reconstructors-land-work-and-engineering-after-civil-war-book-talk?utm_campaign=eng_marketing-activity_fy27&utm_content=1790366823&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

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While the Reconstruction Era in America saw a paradigmatic realignment of the country’s core institutions and values, there was a physical quality to Reconstruction as well: the country was not only rebuilding the South after the Civil War, but flat-out building as it expanded westward.

In Reconstructors, John Dean Davis details how the Army Corps of Engineers and its subcontractors designed and redesigned the infrastructural landscape to support the republic’s rebirth. The Corps’ projects not only transformed the landscape; they created markets, fostered a distinctive expansionist culture, and—for a time—enacted a less discriminatory economic and social agenda across the South and West. Davis aims to bring federal power, environmentalism, and capitalism into a frame that reveals the landscape’s power to further ideology.

Read more
https://knowlton.osu.edu/news/2026/08/john-davis-publishes-reconstructors-land-work-and-engineering-after-civil-war?utm_campaign=eng_marketing-activity_fy27&utm_content=1790366823&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

Davis will also deliver talks at

— The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, September 25
— Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians, October 2
— Dumbarton Oaks, October 22

09/24/2026

09/24/2026

The Knowlton School is saddened to learn of the death of alumna Heather Roberge, AIA (BSArch ’93, MArch ’95).

Roberge was an architect and educator based in Los Angeles, where she was a professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was the founder and principal of design practice Murmur. Her research and professional work investigated the spatial, structural, and atmospheric potential that digital technologies have on the theory and practice of building.

Roberge remained connected to the Knowlton School, and presented as part of the Baumer Lecture Series in 2010 and 2016. Her exhibit, En Pointe, an array of architectural objects that reflected on the historical and spatial significance of the column as both object and series, was on view in the Banvard Gallery in 2015–16.

Roberge was named a Distinguished Alumna by the College of Engineering in 2018.

Read more
https://knowlton.osu.edu/news/2026/09/memoriam-heather-l.-roberge-aia?utm_campaign=eng_marketing-activity_fy27&utm_content=1790272382&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

09/23/2026

In July 2026, architecture students in Curtis Roth’s Architectural Weaving course collaborated with Brazilian architect Gloria Cabral to produce tiles for “Suspension (Debris of History, Matters of Memory).”

That piece is now on view at the Wexner Center for the Arts as part of “Sammy Baloji: When Extraction Becomes Form It Speaks in Borrowed Tongues.”

The process of creating the tiles moved through several workstations set up outside the Knowlton Hall Materials and Fabrication Lab and West Patio. Beginning with breaking paver stone, brick, glass, and granite into fragments, the pieces were then saturated with water and carefully arranged within molds. Over 300 tiles were created from the concrete-cast molds.

“I think architecture students sometimes imagine that the design process ends once the drawings are done, but in the case of Gloria’s project, much of that design work involved scripting the intricate flow of materials and labor,” said Interim Section Head and Associate Professor of Architecture Curtis Roth, who described the students’ efforts as a complex choreography that worked out as the process unfolded.

Read more
https://knowlton.osu.edu/news/2026/09/architectural-weaving?utm_campaign=eng_marketing-activity_fy27&utm_content=1790206560&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

09/21/2026

On view in the Banvard Gallery
The Thunder is Loud and Rolling
AUG 25–OCT 15

The Thunder is Loud and Rolling brings together practitioners confronting the fraught conditions shaping southern Lebanon today, where earth and sky emerge as sites of struggle and fields of possibility. While older negotiations with the environment persist, agricultural life must now calibrate between a high-tech occupation overhead and an enduring fidelity to land and harvest below, giving rise to spatial and cultural practices that unsettle any easy division between war and peace.

In their drawings, EcoRove and Mohamad Nahleh render this entanglement legible, tracing how militarization is at once eclipsed and reimagined through an insistence on a shared, postcolonial future. Through sound installation and ceramic bells, Ghida Anouti and Jess Myers tune the space to the enduring temporalities of land and the strained listening that occurs in the fragile timing of safety and seasonal order.

The Banvard Gallery is located on the first floor of Knowlton Hall and is open Monday–Friday from 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Read more
https://knowlton.osu.edu/events/2026/08/thunder-loud-and-rolling?utm_campaign=eng_marketing-activity_fy27&utm_content=1790028060&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

09/18/2026

LARCH 4410 / 7410
Carbon and Craft:
A Seed to Garment Seminar
Instructor: Marilyn Reish

Over the autumn 2026 semester, students in Midwest Landscape Lab Fellow Marilyn Reish’s Landscape Architecture course, Carbon and Craft, will learn about the history of transforming plants into textiles. We'll be following along as they continue their work at Waterman Farm and elsewhere, and contribute to Rustbelt Fibershed’s One Year One Outfit project.

09/17/2026

House for Everything
Riley Kinkade, Mallory Goubeaux
Architecture UG3 Studio / Spring 2026
Instructor: Georg Rafailidis

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This project is centered around Dimitra’s love for churches, translating the spatial qualities and experiences of a church into ordinary spaces.

Church-like volumes begin to interrupt the existing structure to create a relationship between the new and the old.

Through the use of a wide range of scales, there is a spatial buffet for any program type to find a space within the building.

There are two separate buildings occupying the volume, one with a grand street facing entry and the other a modest ramp to the basement.

A double helix ramp system guides the journey between these volumes to connect the indoor and outdoor and create tension between what you can see and where you can go.

Read more
https://knowlton.osu.edu/news/2026/09/house-everything?utm_campaign=eng_marketing-activity_fy27&utm_content=1789679708&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook