Supervisor:
Janike Kampevold Larsen
Marianne Lucie Skuncke
However, large scale landscape operations took place in order to make nature tourism convenient and comfortable for visitors, resulting in a contradiction - a reverence and marvel in the savage power of nature, yet a highly controlled manipulation of it in order to experience it in a romanticised way.
Today the Catskills is promoted as a wilderness area having been heavily reforested and most manmade structures removed. While the state has prioritized wilderness over her-itage values, the Catskills Forest Preserve is not an area of true wilderness, but a cultural landscape. The area should be re-addressed to incorporate our hand in its shaping.
The project proposes a series of human-scale interventions that reimagine romantic era design principles to reflect the rich natureculture of this landscape. These landscape acts aim to raise a contemporary awareness to the forces of deep time of the geologic and gla-cial that shaped the vistas and cliffs, in relation to the more recent marks of man. The interventions exist hoping to spark a sense of reenchantment and surprise in this interconnection between species, spaces and time.
The Ballroom (cover image) proposes a dance floor that blends the unseen influences of man and nature into a new choreography in the form of a raised meadow.
Cloud Rock is a space for man to interact with glacial forces by augmenting the lines of glacial striations into parallel walking paths excavated into rock.
The Silver Line reclaims the linear space created by the Otis Elevating Railway built in 1892 through the construction of a long staircase trail.
Overall, the project creates a new network that connects to the framework of the existing infrastructure of roads and trails, but also to the traces of the past. It forms an integrated landscape that invites movement through discovery.
Contact
Jessica Minn / hello@jessicaminn.com / www.jessicaminn.com