Located directly on the Pacific Ocean coast line, the land of Swanton Ranch is unique among Cal Poly's land holdings. Existing over two-hundred miles directly north in the greener world of Santa Cruz County, the land here stands in dramatic contrast to the mild grassy hillsides surrounding Cal Poly. Featuring dense Redwood forests, year round wetlands, even sandy beaches, Swanton Ranch offers Cal Poly a different window with its own view of how humans, plants, and land interact.

This website is intended to encourage visitors to consider the relationships between the different textures found at Swanton Ranch. By engaging in such an exercise, it is possible for individuals to better understand the place and their own relationship to it.

Any trip to Swanton Ranch will leave the visitor with a distinct sense of a wide range of textures. The layers of texture found there are often mixed together, creating many juxapositions, meaning textures with opposing meanings. The main textures this site will explore are ones which demonstrate such juxtapositions.

For simplicity's sake, we have broken the many layers of texture into a few categories.

Plants and Decaying Human Works

Humans, Plants and Decaying Human Works

Steel and Wood

Stone and Water

Humans, Stone and Water

Humans and Plants