NJ Turnpike Pattern Book
Exit Domains and Ecologies
Publication
Tommy Yang • Brian McGrath
Post - Traffic Patterns - 05/02/2022
Feature and Interview - You from Jersey? What ecology? - 04/10/2022
Publication - NJ Turnpike Pattern Book: Exits, Domains, and Ecologies - 11/2021
The Turnpike Pattern Book maps a journey and a history across the Lunaape territory of New Jersey—a landscape between two rivers. This terminal moraine, or a mass of rocks and sediment left behind from the end of a glacier, was colonized by a network of trading and farming settlements, then transformed into industrial centers that connected coal mines to ports via canals and railroads. The construction of the Turnpike ushered in a galactical system that supports our consumer, mail order, pandemic-stricken society, which is dependent on essential workers. Exits are the stops on the journey; ecologies, the layers one encounters at these stops; and domains, the landscapes that we imagine can reterritorialize the Turnpike.
Crossing the Hudson, 2022, Yang and McGrath
We come not to praise but to reform the Turnpike through bottom-up activism of human and non-human life forces that are based in the rich array of domains broken by the Turnpike’s relentlessness. We propose this pattern language as a way to reterritorialize the Turnpike and New Jersey for the future.
Tommy Yang and Brian McGrath, “NJ Turnpike Patternbook: Exit, Domains, and Ecologies,” in Dense Issue 01, ed. 36-53, (Newark: Dense, 2021).