6.4 Design closure

The sublime alpine landscape of Aoraki/Mt. Cook provides visitors with an out-of-the-ordinary, humbling and invigorating experience. In some ways, the current human dimension within the Park enhances these aspects (with trails, accessibility, maintenance, etc.), but in other ways, it compromises them. The design strategy for the Park and context offers a chance to restore a meaningful relationship with the landscape by both openly acknowledging the significance of what is being lost and daring to address the whole system so that the acknowledgement is consequential.

The intervention pulls together the fragmented desires and concerns of visitors and locals. I hope that it resonates with those that are attached to this place and those that return home to share what they have gained. The design strategy does not have a strong physical presence, but it does dare to work with the landscape to guide the visitor through a transformational experience.

Reassurance From a design perspective, the decisions to enable a state of melancholic contemplation can be justified. However, the design might alarm some stakeholders, because the measures imply rules that will considerably affect the Park’s use and experience.

In response, I zoom out to the bigger picture and make a request to those that might be concerned: consider this design in the context of contemporary society. Contemporary society enables and expects abundance, hyper mobility, freedom, productivity, and speed (Fullagar, et al., 2012). Rules that do not conform to expectations are often seen as controlling, backwards, and resistant. What I ask is to view the design strategy as an enabling of another way of being, rather than a resistance. It takes courage to slow down, accept melancholy, and reflect on where humanity has arrived. What if we trust that doing so will help us? What if, in time, it actually symbolizes a new kind of progress?

“If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don’t admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers don’t do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one.”

- Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary -

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