Project Description
“ Change is the essence. To Reveal what is always there is the trick. The metamorphosis is seen minute by minute, season by season, year by year. Through this looking glass, ‘finish’ is another word for death .”
This insight from the late New Jersey landscape architect, James Rose, illustrates the paradox of trying to preserve his 1985 corporate campus, Texwipe; a problem exacerbated by a spontaneous design method that did not include plans or much of a visual record of the design.
Texwipe relocated in 2001 and, before the site began to quickly deteriorate, the landscape architects/historians documented the work in a series of measured drawings and black-and-white photographs. These documents, together with extensive consultation, would serve as the basis for the design’s rehabilitation after the abandoned and degraded site was purchased in 2017 by EarthCam, a webcam technology company who implemented the rehabilitation in-house.
Changes were made in accordance with the Secretary of the Interior’s guidelines for “rehabilitation,” in order to accommodate its new use and a new generation of users, but the design’s distinctive spatial organization and character-defining features were preserved through research, documentation, consultation and rehabilitation; thus reversing the course of change from decay to growth once again.
