Sprawling over 3000 acres, the Port of Newark serves as one of the busiest ports in the Northeast, handling over 1.5 million containers a year and constantly filled with everything and anything while facilitating the majority of our global commerce, illicit activity, but most of all it is representative of the damage caused by our mass consumption and growing globalization embodied through today’s extensive migration flows and mega infrastructure. Since the 19th century, ports have been forced to invest in technology to keep up with this consumption, transforming it into an otherworldly landscape now housing the tallest structures in Newark. The handling of bigger and greater quantities of cargo transformed the port from a large labor intensive force, to a now capital intensive with minimal human presence.
The Port Newark Hotel serves as a destination with front row tickets to this spectacle, where visitors can witness firsthand this otherworldly highly industrialized space. From the moment of entering the hotel, the physical entry implies the beginning of an optical sequence of gradienting clarity. Surveillance of this process plays a key role in the experience, where the use of varying layers of visibility arranges the visitors’ views to the damage to intentionally reveal ground 0 of where our consumption begins- views are determined on whether the guest is an everyday consumer or one who is facilitating it. In addition to being suspended within this space, this site will engage with the activities of the port by allowing circulation to continue on its normal route on the ground level, in addition to a gift shop that will house the contents of overstayed shipping containers.
