Routes post doc around the world

W 125th street Viaduct, Manhattan

Janike Kampevold Larsen, post doc in the Routes project and presently a guest scholar at Columbia University, New York, was invited to present Routes research at the Faculty of Architecture and Planning at Dalhousie University, Canada. On March 25 she presented “The Spectacle of Roads and Nature, The Norwegian Tourist Route Project”, exploring the Tourist Route Project in light of 19th century panoramic traditions. In May, Kampevold Larsen was an invited speaker at the Landscape Video Conference at ETH, Zürich, where she presented the lecture “Looking at or being in; the desire for Landscape in Moving Views and Parallax Spaces”, discussing the experiential parallels between contempora-ry infrastructural structures and baroque space.  Larsen’s ETH pre-sentation can be viewed here.

Guest researcher to the Routes project

The Routes project team has been delighted to welcoming Vittoria Di Palma, landscape historian from Columbia University, New York, as a guest researcher to the Routes project in May and June 2010. During Di Palma’s stay, the Routes project team has visited several key collections of Norwegian landscape painting, among others the Royal Palace in Oslo, Oscarshall, Thomas Heftye’s Frognæs (now the residence of the British ambassador to Norway), and Bogstad gård. Di Palma will contribute an essay to the Routes-collection which will be published by Ashgate in 2011.

Routes paper at the Society of Architectural Historians Annual Meeting

Mari Hvattum was to give her paper ‘”Goats, Englishmen, and art-lovers from the low-land”: A. O. Vinje and the making of the modern mountainscape’ at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in Chicago, 21st-25th April 2010. Due to volcano troubles and cancelled flights, however, she could not get to the conference in person. The paper will instead be delivered by video.

The Norwegian Roads Administration supports the Routes project

The Routes project is happy to announce that The Norwegian Public Roads Administration has decided to grant additional financial support to one of the project’s senior researchers: Beate Elvebakk from the Norwegian Institute of Transport Economics. The support, extending over three years, will enable Elvebakk to expand her focus on landscape practices in urban areas. The aim of this study is to improve the Roads Administration’s theoretical and empirical  competence on their own and others’ aesthetic thinking relative to roads and landscapes. The Routes project team is grateful for the support, which strengthens the already active collaboration between the Routes project and the Norwegian Public Roads Administration.

Affiliated researcher to the Routes project

The cultural historian Kristina Skåden has become an affiliated researcher to the Routes project. Skåden is a PhD stipendiat at the University of Oslo, Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS), working on the dissertation Production of Landscape: Norwegian-German relations in the automobile- and road sectors 1933-1940.  Skåden will take active part in the Routes projects’ seminars and events, and her research greatly strengthen the project’s inquiries into 20th century car culture. In the spring 2010, Skåden is a guest researcher at the Technische Universität in Berlin.

The Routes Conference

Click on image for details on the conference

On the 24th and 25th September 2009, The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, in collaboration with the University of Oslo and Norwegian Institute of Transport Economics, invited scholars and students to an international conference on routes, roads, and landscapes. The conference investigated the ways in which various kinds of routes have shaped modern conceptions of the landscape, and inquired into the role of the route itself, both as an aesthetic object and as a setting for aesthetic practices.

Outstanding international scholars from many fields were invited as key note speakers, and an open call for papers had attracted a large number of abstracts for the open sessions. The conference gathered all together 21 speakers from 9 different countries, representing a wide range of disciplines. The artists Ingrid Book and Carina Hedén presented an exhibition of recent landscape and road photography with the title Produserte landskap, made specially for the Routes conference. With an audience of more than one hundred people, the Routes-conference provided two stimulating days of lectures and discussion. Click here for details.

Routes paper at the conference ‘Technik und die Wiederkehr der Natur’

18th and 19th June 2009, the Routes project’s guest scholar Lars Frers participated in the conference ‘Technik und Wiederkehr der Natur - zur Ästhetik der Schöpferischen Zerstöring’ with the paper “Erschöpfung und Erosion. Eine Phenomenologie der Handlungsmacht des Natürlichen”. The conference was organised by Sektion Technik- und Wissenschaftsforschung and Sektion Umweltsoziologie der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie (DGS) at the Helmholz-Zentrum für Umweltforschung in Leipzig.

Routes seminar at the Norwegian Road Museum

Seven Routes scholars presented their projects at a one day research seminar titled ‘Veien, reisen og landskapet’ at the Norwegian road museum, Friday 5th of June. The seminar was the first in a series of collaborative events between the Road Museum and the Routes project. The seminar was followed by an excursion to historical roads and routes in the Øyer area, led by the Road Museum’s director Geir Paulsrud.

Routes paper at the British Sociological Association’s annual conference

Lars Frers presented his paper “Landscape, the body, and the route. The sociomateriality of road stops between materiality and fatigue” at the British Sociological Association’s annual conference in Cardiff, 16-18 April 2009. He spoke in a panel devoted to ‘Space, Mobility and Place’.

Two Routes papers at the Society of Architectural Historians’ Annual Meeting

Janike Kampevold Larsen and Mari Hvattum presented Routes-related papers at the 2009 annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in Pasadena, 1-5 April 2009. Larsen spoke in a session devoted to ‘The Architecture of the Road: Space, Commerce, and Mobilization’, and the title of her paper was ’Installing Landscape: Norway’s Tourist Routes’. Mari Hvattum spoke of ‘Panoramas of Style: Railway architecture in 19th century Norway’ in the session ‘Travel as Architectural Epistemology’.