NORWEGIAN NATIONAL TOURIST ROUTES | infrastructure as a culturally active product, a cultural manifestation
In an attempt to attract more tourists to Norway, the Norwegian Public Roads Administration initiatied the design and construction of National Tourist Routes in the 1990s. These are infrastructural rennovations and newly designed roadside ammenities and stopping points that provide an alternative to the main roads. They feature activities and attractions that enhance the experience both of travel and of stopping along the way. A collaboration among early career architects, landscape designers, and artists, the project combines modern architecture and contemporary art with the intention of renewing and developing Norwegian architecture.
DETOUR exhibition at Parsons, Fall 2009
A traveling exhibition about the project, DETOUR, was hosted by The New School this year. Speakers and literature about the project describe it as being about both developing and reinterpreting Norwegian cultural traditions, including traditional architecture and iconic scenes of Norwegian landscape. The routes and stopping points are conceived as structures adapting to landscapes across the country, and while also recognizing that the routes pass through cultural landscapes with strong building traditions. The architecture and art along the routes are intended to " invoke a common cultural point of reference."
DETOUR exhibition at Parsons, Fall 2009
DETOUR exhibition at Parsons, Fall 2009
According to the exhibition catalogue, "the ambition here was not only to make it possible to experience the countryside, but to tell a meaningful story about the town’s history and use of natural resources . . . creating architecture and design that is a culturally active product is about both developing and reinterpreting tradition . . . infrastructure is about both developing and reinterpreting tradition."
DETOUR exhibition at Parsons, Fall 2009
Literary critic and writer Janike Kampevold Larsen wrote a critical analysis of the forms of the infrastructure-as-architecture that were created for the project ("The Forms of the National Tourist Routes", in Detour: Architecture and Design along 18 National Tourist Routes). She concludes her discussion with a consideration of the diving-board-like viewing platform at Stegasein.
This particular viewing point overlooks a well-known, much (over) photographed fjord that is in danger of becoming a cliche of the iconic picturesque landscape. Larsen celebrates Stegasein for it's "enormous self-reference . . . it draws attention from the view to its own form and dimensions and to the physical presence of the viewer and point of view rather than the view, saying: "nature is seen and formed by the gaze." In this way, she says, Stegasein manages to "lose the view to sight" by staging a “blindness to panorama” at the same time it launches visitors into thin air --into the panorama itself. At the furthest end of structure, only a chest-high glass wall separates visitors from the precipice. "The physical feeling of being there is all one can think about, " Larsen says. The effect is that visitors are invited to stop representing or consuming this "view." Instead, Larsen writes, visitors are granted "an opportunity to develop an attention to our own imagining and production of nature."
You could say that developing an attention to one's own imagining and production of meaning supports, and might even be analogous to, developing attention to one's own sense of and sensations of learning.
The potential that the Norwegian National Tourist Routes project holds for discussions of civic pedagogies for noncompliant learning hinges on its experimental joining of:
- infrastructural imperatives of remote roadways
- with traditional and modern architectures
- with contemporary art sited simultaneously in "natural" landscapes and in infrastructural landscapes
- with tourist experience design that seeks to provoke cultural production rather than cultural consumption
