Under the Power Lines
Jacob SwansonThe New Jersey Meadowlands exist between the natural and the human-made, at once a nature preserve, hub for bird watchers, urbanized area, sport complex, shopping destination,
light industrial center, and landfill that has been riven by infrastructure for cars, trains, planes, and electricity. Nature and humanity have long been considered antagonistic and the Meadowlands may seem like a particularly visible site in the fight between humankind’s will to remake the landscape to their own liking and the vicissitudes of biogeophysical processes and non-human life.
However, the reality of the Meadowlands is of wary coexistence between these forces, the product of an uneasy truce where neither has been successful in erasing the other. Under the Power Lines aims to complicate perceptions of the relationship between the human and non-human, moving past easy oppositional framings towards a more contingent and dialectical one.
Appropriating the aesthetic language of the power lines, the veins that carry the lifeblood of contemporary life, with a tensegrity/gerberette structural system for a bird hospital, nesting structures, and boardwalk heightens the bizarre quality of the Meadowlands, undermines the perceived permanence of existing infrastructures, and asks whether structures for non-humans are infrastructural.
Jacob Swanson is pursuing a Bachelor of Architecture from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. This project was originally prepared for ARCH 296 taught by Esther Zipori in Spring 2023.
This project was published as part of Transect Volume 5: Pedagogy (2024), Jacob Swanson, Daniel Girgis, Dhruvi Rajpopat, Fatima Fardos, Jimenna Alcantar, Elizabeth Kowalchuk, eds.