Awards & Honors

We’re excited to report that CCNY included two Spitzer students on its Great Grads highlight publication this year.

 

JEANA PEARL FLETCHER – MLA PROGRAM

After leaving Delaware to pursue college track and field, and an undergraduate degree in visual arts and environmental policy in New York City, Jeana Fletcher eventually found her passion in public spaces and enrolled at The City College of New York. She transitioned from a career in the jewelry industry to landscape architecture, where she plans to advocate for community interests and representation through urban policy and design. “There is a disproportionate number of public spaces lacking maintenance in areas of communities that I feel bound to, and the divestment narrative that flips to green gentrification—in majority BIPOC communities—is persistent across the country,” said Fletcher. In 2020, they served as a moderator on the American Society of Landscape Architecture New York Chapter’s education committee’s panel, “Centering Perspectives: Discussion of Black Equity in Landscape Architecture” and has participated in its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee’s strategic planning. Fletcher seeks to parse the language of the ASLA’s Code of Professional Ethics and its Code of Environmental Ethics in their practice, advocating for the safety and welfare of neurodivergent, disabled, and aging publics’ comfort through design landscapes. “I want to collaborate, as a co-creator, with communities seeking public spaces,” they said. The 34-year-old is a 2021–2022 fellow of the Fund for City of New York’s Community Planning Fellowship Program, working with Manhattan’s Community Board 9. Fletcher is also a recipient of the 2022 Landscape Architecture Foundation Honor Scholarship for Inclusive Community Design and the ASLA-NY Equitable Public Urban Scholarship Award. This summer, Fletcher plans to work with the Science + Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay as a socioecological resilience research fellow.

 

 CAROLINE HO – B.Arch PROGRAM

Having a non-compliant body has not deterred Caroline Ho. That made her what she is and what compels her to make the world a better place through space-making design. “Living with a mobility impairment, I experience the world a little shorter and a little slower than most people my age,” she said. “I notice the subtle, nearly invisible boundaries that set the way I navigate the world on a different path than that of the norm.” To address these boundaries, she dedicated her studio work to removing or mitigating physical barriers in physical spaces. Her projects highlight elements overlooked in “uninviting and exclusionary” architecture for, as she puts it, “people who experience the world differently.”

In one instance, she created a pinup board that was accessible to all by incorporating the ability of the board to come down and fold out. Her activism extends beyond architecture and design. She served as the undergraduate student representative of the Spitzer School’s ad hoc Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) Committee, proposed a playground design for the Kutupalong refugee camp for Rohingya in Bangladesh—the world’s largest such facility—and was a studio teaching assistant and mentor. In addition, the Spitzer faculty selected her as the best student in second year. All of her efforts and advocacy serve her ultimate goal of “seeing positive equitable change in the architectural education system.”