The New Jersey Meadowlands: Inhabiting an Urban Wilderness

The New Jersey Meadowlands is a thirty square mile industrial wetland between New York City and the commercial district of East Rutherford, NJ. The place is both strange and fascinating; many mysteries are hidden between the reed grasses and scattered garbage. Often exposed to subjectivity, the Meadowlands is commonly perceived as a weird, polluted, industrial, and even an other-worldly space; few know its beauty. These differing perceptions create a challenge when thinking of a cohesive identity and sense of place in the marsh. Over time, the once pure landscape has suffered from infrastructural slices, illegal dumping, and environmental abuse, resulting in fragmented land areas along the Hackensack River’s edge. This thesis explores how to inhabit an ecologically devalued and residual landscape through ideas of place-making and re-connecting communities. Investigating the paradox of this massive urban landscape and capitalizing on the ecological and educational potential of the site, lends also to a challenge of converging modern and forgotten life. Designing a place-based ecological research community within this currently placeless environment, will engage the public, re-connect lost communities, and bring a sense of renewal to the marsh.

The Architecture of Waste: Creating New Avenues for Public Engagement with Trash

The relationship between industry, waste, and urbanism is one fraught with problems across the United States and in particular American cities. The interrelated nature of these systems of flows is in critical need of re-evaluation. This thesis critiques the system of Municipal Solid Waste Management as it currently exists in American cities as a necessary yet undesirable ‘invisible infrastructure’. Industry and waste environments have been pushed to the periphery of urban environments, severing the relationship between the urban environment we inhabit and the one that is required to support the way we live. The flow of garbage from cities of high density to landscapes of waste has created a model of valuing waste as a linear system that separates input from output. This thesis aims to investigate ways that industry, waste, and urban ecologies can work to reinforce one another. The goal of this thesis is to repair the physical and mental separation of waste and public activity through architecture. This thesis will propose ways to tie urban waste infrastructure and public amenities together through the merging of architecture and landscape to create new avenues for public engagement with waste processes.