This research project explores the aesthetic strategy of the Tourist Route Project, demonstrating its deep embeddedness in what might be called the ‘first discovery’ of Norway in the nineteenth century, the Western panoramic tradition and the European park and landscape tradition.
The project shows how the TRP transgresses the romantic relation to landscape as image, and the national romantic relation to landscape as one of identity and aligns itself with a pre- and early romantic relationship to nature as a physical occurrence of land informed by a desire to document, collect and exhibit.
Its inherited fascination with form lies not in land as national reservoir but in land as views and collectible typologies and in architectural form as spectacle.