PennPraxis Design Fellows reflect on lessons from the field.
Design Fellows Keith Scheideler and Dagny Carlsson taking drone footage during field work at Tranquility Ridge, Lenape homeland in the New Jersey Highlands Photo: Drone operated by Keith
The Design Fellows program at PennPraxis—the practice arm of the Weitzman School that supports design action in solidarity with students and communities working for change—offers students and recent alums the opportunity to work in close partnership with their neighbors in West Philadelphia and communities beyond to increase their quality of life through design, art, planning, and heritage preservation. This spring and summer, Design Fellows brought their skills to many projects.
Keith Scheideler, Dagny Carlsson, Ramapough Lenape Turtle Clan Chief Vincent Mann, Clan Mother Michaeline Picaro, and Dyan Castro, PennPraxis project designer and manager in the New Jersey Highlands (Photo Ellen Neises)
Dagny Elise Carlsson (MArch’26)
I had an amazing time working with the Ramapough Lenape Turtle Clan this summer. Our [Design Fellow] team was tasked with designing a new community for the Turtle Clan just down the road from where they currently live in northern New Jersey. In the 1960s and ’70s, their land and the surrounding mines were used as a paint sludge dumping ground by Ford Motor Company; the area was later classified as an EPA Superfund site, and the Turtle Clan's consistent and long-term exposure to the toxins there has led to many folks developing serious illnesses. In response, the Turtle Clan is attempting to relocate [with support from New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development], and jointly with Penn Praxis they are working towards designing a new community that can help to reunite families that were displaced and restore cultural practices in the land they hope to steward.
One of my favorite days during the summer was the second time we visited the site to survey it. To best understand the site, we took plenty of pictures and visited areas where the Turtle Clan were proposing to build. Because there is no road through the area (the existing one has degraded over the years), we went on a three hour hike up the ridge to reach some of the necessary locations. After seeing the landscape for myself I have gained a better appreciation of why this land is so important to the Turtle Clan.
It has been an honor to work on this project because it is so closely aligned with the work I would like to do after I graduate. As an indigenous woman, I am particularly interested in serving Native American communities and helping to support community growth and health in the face of extreme hardship. This work felt incredibly meaningful to both the community and myself, and as I worked on the project became more and more committed to seeing it through to completion. I have strengthened my passion for community-oriented design and have a new energy and interest in pursuing it seriously even before I graduate.
I am incredibly hopeful that our work, along with the Turtle Clan’s resilience, will lead to success and new beginnings.
Keith Scheideler (MLA’24)
For me, working for Praxis was a delightful change into doing something unconventional compared to a typical office setting, but the best part about working at Praxis was our team. Everyone on our team had a background in architecture but we each brought ourselves into the project. For example, the Ramapough are people I grew up around, so it was a context I was very familiar with, while Dagny [Elise Carlsson]—who is herself Indigenous and very knowledgeable on Indian policy—was new to this region. I think we both brought our personal backgrounds into our work and were able to mesh together very well, pushing this project as far as we could. I believe Praxis’s greatest strength is finding Fellows’ interests and guiding them towards a project with a greater cause.
Maurcus McDaniel on the viewing platform he designed, in progress at the Fresh Air Fund's Sharpe Reservation in the Hudson Valley, New York Photo: Garry Venable
Marcus McDaniel (BA’24, Undergraduate Architecture)
The project I worked was Design to Thrive at Sharpe Reservation in New York [a sleepaway camp in New York’s Hudson Valley operated by the Fresh Air Fund, a not-for-profit youth development organization], where our team engaged in landscaping and construction activities. My focus was on designing and building both a bench and a boardwalk.
My favorite day was when our team was unexpectedly flooded with 40 campers for a single session, when on average we get around 8 to 10. I appreciated how we all rallied to turn a near disaster into an experience every camper wanted to come back to.
The best part of working with PennPraxis was being able to work alongside a great team in an awesome, welcoming environment. Everyone’s ideas were not only heard but executed, over our summer!
This experience really pushed me to continue chasing this idea of design and build. Being hands on, in both the design and construction process, is very intriguing to me.
Bakari Clark and Priyanjali Sinha visiting PennVet's New Bolton campus to learn about the design and research of large-scale planting projects with Design Fellow Shubhra Goel and Elliot Bullen, PennPraxis project designer and manager (Photo Ellen Neises)
Shubhra Goel (MLA’25)
As someone who has been attuned to the complexities of contemporary agricultural practices globally, I was thrilled to collaborate with Praxis on the Regenerative Agriculture Project at the New Bolton Center [the Penn School of Veterinary Medicine’s campus of some 700 acres in Chester County, Pennsylvania, which includes a large animal hospital]. My background as an architect working mostly in the private sector made this opportunity to collaborate with a non-profit like Praxis especially fulfilling. A standout moment for me was the day we met a stakeholder at the Center for Conservation Agriculture who initially had concerns about the project's impact on land management needs. However, we were able to address his apprehensions swiftly and gain his support, which underscored for me the transformative potential of this field in influencing human and animal lives as well as broader ecological systems.
Assistant Professor of Architecture Dorit Aviv’s Master of Environmental Building Design students measure the heat island in the “before” condition at Sayre High School. Hemant Diyalani (right) helped build the garden and measure its impact on micro-climate as a Design Fellow. (Photo Ellen Neises)
Hemant Diyalani (MSD-EBD’23)
I worked on the renovation of the Sayre High School courtyard in Philadelphia. Seeing the execution of design that was developed after computer simulations based on climate analysis gave me confidence at a certain level about the relevance of such analysis to sustainable design, which I'm pursuing in my career path. Doing hands-on work—whether it was to break an existing concrete planter into pieces, or to saw wood blocks and nail them together to make the replacement planter, bringing the on-paper design to life on our own—was the best part. The day of using the sledge hammer to break huge concrete blocks was the most fun!
Kelvin Vu and Bakari Clark measure the depth of a pond as part of the team’s design of aquatic “pond bombs” that would be thrown by youth in locations in the pond where their rhizomes could take hold and increase biodiversity. (Photo Ellen Neises)
Kelvin Vu (MLA’25, MArch’25)
I worked on the Design to Thrive team with Bakari Clark (MCP’25), Maurcus McDaniel (BA’24), Priyanjali Sinha (MLA’24), and Madi Howard. Our project manager was Ellen Neises [the Lori Kanter Tritsch Executive Director at PennPraxis]. We spent the first seven weeks of the fellowship in Philadelphia designing and working on lesson planning, and we then spent three weeks at Sharpe Reservation in Fishkill, New York, constructing our designs for Grace Pond with the help of teen campers and counselors in the Fresh Air Fund’s summer program.
The best part of working with PennPraxis was following a project from start to finish, from initial research and design development to construction. The timeline was really tight: 11 weeks to research, do fieldwork, design, consult, iterate, source materials, construct, and teach! But with a team of really talented and hardworking people, we managed to get more than 800 plants in the ground and build custom site furnishings, including a giant bench (13 feet long and 6 feet wide) that we named The Stoop. Even more than the designing and building, I learned so much about working as a team: delegating tasks, staying organized, leveraging individual strengths, being honest about what we don’t know, learning new skills from each other, and digging in to get things done. Each person brought specific superpowers that shone at different times and made the whole project possible—we could not have done this project without the full team.
My favorite day included an afternoon in which we planned to work with a group of 15-20 campers. By some miscommunication, we ended up with a group of 40 campers ranging in age from 14 to 18. That afternoon, we also had Amanda Bayley and Mike Feller, our ecological consultants from eDesign Dynamics, with us to do walk-talk-learn sessions with the campers. To accommodate such a big group, we split up between digging holes for hundreds of plants, putting perennials and shrubs into the holes, making “pond bombs” of aquatic plants, boating out into the pond to place the bombs, and collecting big rocks to support a turtle beach we were constructing the water. What was initially a surprise situation turned into a really fun and productive afternoon—proof that successful design-build projects require adaptability, improvisation, a “yes-and” approach, and a willingness to get really sweaty and dirty.
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