Conclusions & discussion
7.2 DISCUSSION 7.2.1 Design question How can a landscape intervention at the Haupapa/Tasman Glacier within Aoraki/Mt. Cook National Park address environmental melancholia and therefore become a place to encourage engagement with glacier retreat? A landscape intervention at the site of the retreating Haupapa/ Tasman Glacier in Aoraki/Mt. Cook National Park cannot physically mitigate climate change. What it can do, however, is create a journey through the landscape that provides individuals with a designated space that accepts the melancholy of losing the glacier and facilitates contemplation about the greater whole. Together, the Journey to Haupapa and the Haupapa Tribute Trail travel from Lake Pukaki, the glacier’s farthest historical extent, into the water of Tasman Lake looking out at the disappearing Haupapa. The keystone strategy at the Park scale is to apply the “modal shift” principle and slow visitors down in gradations as they move through the landscape. Pouwhenua to mark the beginning, moments of stillness, and a centralized visitor centre will also help the visitors reach the trail-head with a degree of focused concentration. The Trail is a walking loop that guides visitors through a sequence of experiences in tribute to the retreating Haupapa. Vanity Stair and Curio, stand out as the most significant gestures of melancholy in the space. Through them, the sense of loss towards the glacier remains immediate and tangible over time. The produced proposal is informative, sensory, temporal and associative and brings the notion of aesthetics back to aesthesis, “the breathing of the world” (Bowring, 2016, p. 27). The landscape encourages engagement by creating a space that explores how aesthetics can contribute to the mental state of melancholic contemplation. The design embraces melancholy and so embraces the full spectrum of human emotion in order to heal (Bowring, 2016). It facilitates contemplation and so grounds, renews, and thereby fosters engagement and actually sustains action (Krinke, 2005) and it employs aesthetics which have the capacity to shift consciousness for the above aims (Meyer, 2008). The intervention demonstrates landscape’s capacity to participate meaningfully to address the psychological dimension of climate change encapsulated in glacier retreat.
OF THEORY
This thesis has drawn from theories and research in different fields and brought them together for the purpose of creating a spatial intervention in an environment relatively unexplored by landscape architects. Because of this, it had to be open to considering new approaches and to use existing approaches in novel ways. The results from the interviews resonated strongly with Lertzman’s theory of environmental melancholia (2016), so I feel confident that it provided the necessary framework within which to consider the experience of glacier retreat. In addition to the theory itself, she encouraged unconventional research methods, which provided me with the courage to try. I believe this resulted in richer information than easier, but narrower methods (such as surveys, etc.). To explore the role of aesthetics to contribute to a mental state, I referred to Zangwill’s Aesthetic Creation Theory (2007). Other authors have argued for its application in landscape architecture and I also found it to be suitable (van Etteger et al., 2016). It was, however, incomplete for this purpose, so I expanded upon it by studying and applying literature about contemplation and melancholy. It is likely my use of Zangwill’s terms, specifically aesthetic and non-aesthetic properties, goes beyond what they were intended for. It was challenging to classify some terms according to these categories, because their definitions could morph depending on how they were used. In addition, the aesthetic framework I propose relies on the notion that reaching contemplation is a process of three stages. Although authors refer to a process indirectly, there are no scientifically reputable sources to directly support the claim that I made for a staged process in which some aesthetic properties affect the success of others. It is the result of a synthesis of literature from different sources and can therefore be considered a new, possibly richer, way of organizing aesthetic information.
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