Crissy Swamp: Hyperreal San Francisco

Crissy Field on the Presidio of San Francisco which before human development was a tidal saltwater marsh. When the United States Military took over the Presidio from the Spanish they filled in the wetlands and turned the uninhabitable area into an airfield that became the first air strip on the West Coast and was of utmost importance during World War I. Developers of the Presidio took tidal maps of Crissy Field from the early 1800’s and used them to reconstruct wetlands destroying much of Crissy Field turning it back into wetlands. The idea was to return it to its original ‘natural’ condition; “to restore the marsh to the pre-military configuration, to an idealized ‘natural’ condition.” The new design turned it into a marsh and estuary. The intent was to create a habitat for birds in the dense city of San Francisco. The ‘ideal’ of nature overwrote the function of the airfield. Today Crissy Field is a “Wildlife Protection Area” in the City of San Francisco. As urban space there is no wildlife to protect except birds which can fly to other estuaries outside of urban areas.

Postmodernism turns space into a hyperreal object: hyperspace. This ideal space is more real than reality. Abstraction overlays the concrete territory producing a simulation. It becomes more ‘natural than nature’ and substitutes itself for nature. Baudrillard’s successive phases of the hyperreal; first is a reflection of Nature. It is a map of the concrete. The second phase is mask and perversion of nature. It masks the absence of nature. In time it bears no relation to nature at all. It is pure simulacrum.