Voorhees Township engineer Joe Hale explaining the site’s stormwater run off drainage system to Rutgers Landscape Architecture graduate students and Wolfram Hoefer, at left, foreground.
The 37 acre landfill on Centennial Boulevard in Voorhees Township, NJ, is the focus of joint efforts among the township, the Voorhees Environmental and Cultural Education Foundation (VECEF) and the Rutgers Center for Urban Environmental Sustainability (CUES) to turn the former South Jersey landfill into an environmental park. The task of coming up with conceptual designs for what will become the Voorhees Environmental Park fell to students in the Rutgers Graduate Program of Landscape Architecture. The students were invited to develop four preliminary, conceptual designs that formed the centerpiece of Voorhees’ Township efforts to reclaim the landfill. “The students’ designs were completed in the spring and were used to test ideas about the conversion of this former Brownfield site into publicly usable open space,” says Wolfram Hoefer (Landscape Architecture; co-director of CUES). Hoefer is also the program director of the Rutgers Landscape Architecture Undergraduate Program.
