Routes, Roads and Landscapes studies the aestheticization of the modern landscape by looking at routes, roads and railways. The scope of the study is twofold. We investigate ways in which various routes shape modern conceptions of the landscape by framing it as a view, as an aesthetic object or as a place for interaction. Secondly, we inquire into the role of the route itself: as an aesthetic object and as a setting for aesthetic practices.

Financed by the Norwegian Research Council’s program for Cultural Evaluation (KULVER), is a multidisciplinary research project based at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO) in collaboration with the University of Oslo (UiO), Institute of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS), Norwegian Institute for Transport Economics (TØI) and the research cluster ‘Topologie der Technik’ at the Technische Universität, Darmstadt. The project runs from 2008 until 2011 and encompasses three senior researchers, one post doctorate, two Ph.D, candidates as well as international guest researchers. It is part of a wide international network of researchers from diverse fields such as science, technology, architectural history, cultural studies, landscape history, art history and sociology.

We have chosen three distinct historical moments as foci for individual study. Firstly, we study the pictorialization of the natural landscape in topographical literature and prospects, looking at the royal voyages of the late eighteenth century and the pictorialized landscapes of nineteenth century national romanticism. Secondly, we study the aestheticization of infrastructure and landscape in proto-modernist and modernist architectural discourse and practice, from the railway developments of the 1850’s to the motorway aesthetics of the 1950’s and 60’s. Lastly, we investigate road and landscape as aesthetic practices, most notably in the work of the Norwegian Public Roads Administration’s on-going National Tourist Route Project from 1995 to 2015. The Tourist Route Project aims to present and promote Norwegian natural landscapes as aesthetic experience. This material reveals three levels of aestheticization at work en route: the road as a work of art, the reification of the landscape as picture and practice and the journey as an “aesthetic” interchange between material and experiential phenomena. The project sheds light on the route and the landscape as culturally constructed and reciprocal phenomena, inexorably inscribed into multiple webs of aesthetic practices.

http://routes.no