The Albany Bulb is an exercise in layering on a number of scales: from the most broad (natural mudflats turned landfill turned growth area for indigenous and exotic flora and fauna turned open art gallery and en plein air residential complex) to the most specific (layers of concrete, rebar, silt, clay and art forming the mass of the peninsula).  Through this process of push and pull between mankind and nature, a kind of unclassifiable habitat has emerged, and this set of inherent contradictions has created a wild-yet-manufactured, anarchic landscape embraced by many and frightening to those who would put labels on everything.

As such, the Bulb (and its environs) must be understood in the context of the multiple systems that operate within it. Correlations are seen between areas of high human influence (which include settlements as well as art installations) and moderate topographical features removed from the most highly traveled paths, such as at the western end of the Bulb. Likewise, the “natural” shape of the manufactured landscape has created inaccessible areas that have given rise to their own private ecologies. The existence of the adjacent mudflats informed the shape of the peninsula, whereas the landfill company’s decision to create a narrow neck and a western bulb formed the steep northern slope that, protected from the western wind, sun exposure and through-hikers became a perfect habitat for shorebirds. The flatness of the plateau lent itself to a network of paths and has been tagged for future development of a recreational field, while this high traffic and the exposure to the elements discouraged both the development of a specialized habitat as well as human settlement or art. Through this network of interrelationships and mutual influences emerges the strange, dynamic, ever-disputed finger of land that makes up the Albany shoreline.