Dynamic Markers

Abstract

When I was a child, I was certain that all clouds came from New Jersey. After passing through the Lincoln Tunnel, I-95 would gradually ascend, lifting our car to eye level with the billowing clouds emerging from beneath us. These clouds rose from the Meadowlands, a great marsh just two miles west of Manhattan, a landscape that has become defined by the infrastructure that occupies it. Nearly equal in land mass and opportunity to Manhattan, this landscape managed to resist holistic transformation due to our inability to control its water. Rather than becoming a prosperous site for agriculture in the 19th century, or the next metropolis in the early 20th, the Meadowlands fell out of focus and became a site to absorb the infrastructural networks needed to uphold rapid development at its edges.

The Meadowlands was sutured shut by the networks interlaced through it in an attempt to erase the failures of the past. Utilizing this landscape as an urban sponge neglected that the marsh hosted a series of ecological infrastructures of its own. The Meadowlands' soft, uncertain ground once managed variations in the water level, but the draining of the ground that came with development reduced its capacity, making pump stations essential for managing water in inhabited areas. Unlike the other forms of infrastructure in the Meadowlands, the presence of the pump station is subdued, its invisibility upholds the illusion that the developments within this landscape are not threatened by their surroundings. However, steady sea level rise and an increase in storm surges have caused these pumps to fail, pulling the veil on their existence and more importantly, the essential role they play in our continued occupation of this landscape. The urgent need to increase the capacity of the pump station provides an opportunity to reconsider their agenda.

This thesis proposes the Dynamic Marker, a new type of infrastructure that redefines the relationship between human systems and ecological flows. Grafted onto existing pump stations in the Meadowlands, it releases water as mist from 800 feet in the air, transforming the hidden mechanics of water management into a moment of wonder. The Dynamic Marker fosters microclimates and ecological connections, transforming infrastructure into a dynamic process that evolves with its surroundings. Over time, it becomes both a memorial to the marsh and a provocation for the future, inviting a rethinking of infrastructure as a participatory and adaptive force that responds to its surrounding ecology.