Zhijie Wang | Designing Without Knowing: Landscape Heritage and the Uncertain Ecology of the Meadowlands

Zhijie Wang (MSHP '26) won the Anthony Nicholas Brady Garvan Award for an Outstanding Thesis/Capstone. 

Abstract: 

The Hackensack Meadowlands has been dumped on, drained, diked, and crossed through — and it is still changing. Fewer than six miles from Midtown Manhattan, this 8,400-acre tidal basin carries three centuries of compounded human intervention in its soils, hydrology, and plant communities. Its value as a heritage landscape resides in the ongoing sequence of operations that have made and remade it. This thesis proposes a framework for preservation practice in landscapes whose heritage lies in how they keep changing. Working at the intersection of historic preservation and landscape architecture, it argues that the Meadowlands' capacity for transformation is itself the primary thing worth preserving. Against models that treat significance as fixed fabric and restoration as return, this thesis advances a functional account: what holds heritage value in an operational landscape is the legibility of the processes through which it has been and continues to be made. The thesis reads the Meadowlands through three dominant land operations — dump, drain, cross — tracing how each left a distinct instrument in the ground. Three site interventions are proposed, each taking an inherited instrument and redirecting its logic: nucleated planting and slope regrading at a capped landfill edge; Open Marsh Water Management and killifish release at a grid-ditched marsh interior; and tidal reconnection along a highway embankment. None prescribes an ecological outcome. Each opens a process and waits to see what the marsh does with it.

Download Zhijie Wang's thesis, "Designing Without Knowing: Landscape Heritage and the Uncertain Ecology of the Meadowlands"
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