playstations

Landscape Option Studio: Changing Tides
Sept-Dec 2025

Play-stations traces a slow and deliberate journey across the varied landscapes of Martin Head, New Brunswick, inviting visitors to inhabit the tidal world through three distinct acts of looking, listening, and lingering. Rather than imposing form, each intervention draws itself from the character of its site: salt marsh, rocky cliff, and the temporal debris of people.

Together, the three stations compose a loose, wandering observatory. They do not prescribe a route but offer nodes of intensity across the landscape, connected by existing trails and desire lines. Each calibrates the body differently to the tidal world: horizontal attention at the marsh, vertical confrontation at the cliff, interior stillness at the lighthouse. The sequence is an open invitation to sense and play with the sea’s presence and material force not as spectacle but as a companion and playmate.

The Saltmarsh Platform rests just above the brackish edge where river, land, and ocean meet. Oriented along the tidal channel, its timber deck hovers at the threshold between freshwater and salt, dry ground and flood. Twice daily the marsh breathes—filling with the Bay’s immense tidal push, then draining to expose mud ribbons and spartina roots. The platform gathers these rhythms: the murmur of wind through cordgrass, the flicker of shorebirds probing the flats, the quiet pulse of water rising through the sedge. A simple crossing point, it carries visitors over the channel from the entrance road into the site’s interior, but it also invites pause. Benches face the marsh’s horizontal expanse. Here the act is listening—attending to the sonic texture of an ecosystem in constant exchange with the sea.

The Lighthouse stands in the ruins of the original Martin Head light station. It borrows the familiar maritime silhouette, but as a sketch. This beacon guides not sailors but wanderers, drawing them along forest trails toward the headland’s heart. Inside, the circular room is quiet, contemplative. Light filters through the walls, shifting with sun and cloud. The act here is lingering, a space for rest and reflection after the sensory intensity of marsh and cliff. The lighthouse reorients the journey inward, toward memory and meaning.

The Cliff Tower leans toward the Bay of Fundy from a basalt outcrop partway along the headland’s shore. It is a buoy of joy at the continent’s edge, both trembling and assured. Four steel columns anchor into the stone, lifting the viewing chamber above the spray zone while allowing wind to pass beneath. In strong weather the structure hums, vibrating at frequencies tuned to the gale. A wavering bridge carries the wanderer from the forest’s hush to this precipice, the crossing a small drama of exposure. Inside, the tower keeps vigil over the Bay’s vast inhale and exhale: tides swelling against the cliffs, then retreating to reveal boulder fields and tidal pools. The act here is looking, an unobstructed confrontation with the sea’s scale and motion.