Project by Jessica Lin
The Hudson River has long been treated as a dumping ground. For decades, industrial facilities released PCBs, heavy metals, and sewage directly into the river. Combined sewer overflows from New York City still discharge untreated waste during storms. Plastics, microbeads, oil residues, and other urban pollutants accumulate in the sediment. These contaminants don’t simply disappear — they sink, settle, and persist, forming a layered history of human waste
Today, the river is shaped not by purity but by pollution — a post-natural ecosystem where sea lampreys, mutant fish species, parasites and bacteria thrive amongst human waste, decomposing matter and a river bed covered by “black mayonnaise”. This dark sludge, composed of hydrocarbons, fecal matter, and industrial chemicals, functions as both a toxic agent and a medium of life. Within this dense sediment, anaerobic processes unfold silently, sustaining microbial worlds that resist easy classification as healthy or harmful. The river is not dead — it has simply reorganized life along different logics, ones that architecture has rarely considered.
The river is a living archive of environmental abjection
This horror-ecosystem defies the conventional binaries of nature versus culture, life versus death, and desirable versus undesirable. It forces us to confront forms of life that do not fit into the aesthetics of preservation or the politics of sustainability. Lampreys with their toothed mouths, parasites feeding on decomposing flesh, bacteria breaking down sewage — these are agents of a metabolic process we choose not to see. Yet they reveal that pollution is not a static state, but a dynamic condition, where contamination breeds adaptation and survival in unexpected ways.
Could the Hudson River help us unlearn architecture’s maniacal pursuit of control, cleanliness, and permanence? Can we instead embrace abjection as a design method — engaging with decay, toxicity, and invasive lifeforms as materials and collaborators? To do so would mean reorienting architectural thought away from mastery and towards vulnerability. It would mean working with materials that are unstable, smells that linger, forms that collapse. It would involve designing infrastructures that leak, stain, and erode — not as signs of failure, but of ongoing negotiation with environment and time. In this light, abjection is not merely rejection, but a space of possibility.
Rather than preserving a romanticized past or extracting for profit, future design could metabolize troubled ecosystems by working along with polluted conditions to generate new hybrid habitats.
The sea Lamprey becomes an allegorical species of this troubled subaquatic landscape. By learning from vernacular adaptation — not in nostalgic terms, but through the aggressive survival of invasive species — architecture could cultivate an “invasive vernacular” rooted in disruption. As an ancient vertebrate with a parasitic adult form and a detritus-feeding larval stage, the sea lamprey embodies the duality of harm and healing. It thrives in waters that others avoid and turns waste into nourishment. Its very life cycle depends on sediment — the very stuff we consider polluted — using it as both refuge and food source. It adapts not by conquering the environment, but by embedding itself within its most neglected parts. This makes it not only a symbol of ecological resilience, but also a model for how architecture might embed itself within damaged sites without seeking to cleanse or erase them.
This living archive of environmental abjection is a speculative infrastructure that does not resist collapse but acknowledges its ongoing shaping of the river, allowing building materials to rot, ferment, and nourish other systems. In doing so, we begin to reinvent our relationship with the river — not as an object to be saved, but as an active agent in a shared metabolic process. This vision unfolds as an ongoing material inquiry — one that engages the polluted riverbed not as a problem to solve, but as a collaborator. At the heart of this exploration is a mixture of black mayonnaise and clay — substances typically cast off as waste or ruins. When brought together, they enter into a slow, unstable dialogue. Layered, buried, left to dry, they crack unevenly, breathing through fissures that open and close over time. These layers do not resist decay; they invite it. As the material contracts and settles, it creates porous surfaces and hidden cavities. Within them, fungi, anaerobic bacteria, and aquatic eggs might take hold — life forms that thrive in oxygen-poor, contaminated conditions. The process mirrors the metabolic rhythms of the river itself: layering, waiting, eroding, regenerating. It is a ritual of material transformation — one that acknowledges grief, toxicity, and survival as inseparable. Among the potential co-inhabitants is the sea lamprey, a species often misunderstood. Its larvae live buried for years in soft sediment, feeding on detritus. Here, they might find breathable pockets, seeded with nutrients, refreshed through seasonal acts of care. The living archive of environmental abjection is not about returning the river to a past ideal. Instead, it interrogates how we might dwell within its decay — how might we build with what we have cast out. The black mayonnaise and clay, in their instability and richness, suggest an architecture that is temporal, metabolic, and radically unfinished — one that participates in the life and death cycles of the river, rather than standing apart from them.
