The Landscapes of the Norwegian Scenic Routes

Over the past thirty years, the “Norwegian Scenic Routes” project has produced imaginative buildings and landscapes in poetic dialogue with Norway’s unique scenery and road infrastructure. As much as the program remains vital, sensibilities toward the astonishing Norwegian landscape and what it means to enjoy the beautiful vistas along the road are changing.

After the program’s first three decades, there is increasing demand for a renewal of values and design techniques that address the scenic route’s relationship to Norwegian climate policies, as well as the evolving aesthetics and poetics around the terms “landscape” and “view.” Outside of Norway, the project has served as a platform for discussing architecture and landscape in relation to art and nature, disseminating the design culture it has contributed to creating. The scenic routes program daringly privileges artistic merit over experience, and has therefore become a platform for small, creative and young boutique practices.

The studio will consider three fundamental questions the program has yet to address:
— Vision and technology
— New scales
— The road as culture

We will explore how technology shapes a designer’s relation to beautiful scenery. In Norway, sophisticated high-resolution surveys and databases of the landscape are publicly available. Architects and landscape architects still need to capitalize on this rich material. We will explore techniques to translate these sophisticated surveys into concrete spatial decisions. This methodology is equally helpful for architects and landscape architects and opens the evaluation of these sophisticated documents beyond their technical implications.

The second question is about scale and media. With increasing pressure to produce new projects that go beyond beautiful objects amidst beautiful scenery, landscape architects are gaining relevance while architects are pushed to expand the limits of the poetic object in connection to the environment.

Along scenic routes, mining and other infrastructural sites located amidst astonishing landscapes create the need to design projects between architecture and landscape architecture that can simultaneously address nature’s exploitation and the extreme beauty of their context. Projects proposed in the studio will also contribute to the evolving nature of road and car culture in some of Northern Europe’s most delicate landscapes, a rapidly changing subject posing new design questions.