The Routes project team is happy to announce that the edited collection Routes, Roads and Landscapes is out, published by Ashgate and available from November 1st, 2011. The collection brings together outstanding scholars from cultural history, geography, philosophy, and a host of other disciplines, examining the complex entanglement between routes and landscapes in Europe and North America from 1750 until the present. It traces changing conceptions of the landscape, looking at how movement has been facilitated, imagined and represented and how such movement in turn has conditioned understandings of the landscape. A particular focus is on the modern transportation landscape as it came into being with the canal, the railway, and the automobile. These modes of transport have had a profound impact on the perception and conceptualization of the modern landscape, a relationship investigated in detail by authors such as Gernot Böhme, Sarah Bonnemaison, Tim Cresswell, Finola O’Kane, Charlotte Klonk, Peter Merriman, Christine Macy, David Nye, Vittoria Di Palma, Charles Withers, and Thomas Zeller. More information on the Ashgate web catalogue here.

On Wednesday 28th September, the Routes project invited to an open symposium on roads and landscapes at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Antoine Picon from Harvard and Hans Dienel from TU Berlin lectured on roads, landscapes, and their entanglement, and researchers from the Routes project presented their studies. Thanks to speakers and audience for a stimulating day!

PROGRAM - THE END OF THE ROAD

10.00   Welcome

10.15   Antoine Picon (Harvard University): “Roads and Landscape: The Narrative Dimension”

11.00   Coffee break

11.15   Mari Hvattum (AHO): “Routes, Roads and Landscapes”

11.45   Movements through the Landscape: Routes project presentations by Brita Brenna/Torild Gjesvik/Marie-Theres Fojuth/Kristina Skåden

Questions and discussion

12.30 Lunch

13.30   Sverker Sörlin (KTH Stockholm): “Roadside Art(iculations): Highways and the Branding of Landscapes”

14.15    Speed, Flow and Sight: Routes project presentations by Even Smith Wergeland/Beate Elvebakk/Janike Kampevold Larsen/Lars Frers

14.45    Coffee break

15.00    Hans-Liudger Dienel (TU Berlin): “The Art of the Long View”

Questions and discussion

16.00     End

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Antoine Picon is a historian of technology and professor at Harvard University. Trained as an engineer, architect, and historian, Picon works on the history of architectural and urban technologies from the eighteenth century to the present. His French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment (1988; English translation, 1992) is a synthetic study of the disciplinary “deep structures” of architecture, garden design, and engineering in the eighteenth century, and their transformations as new issues of territorial management and infrastructure-systems planning were confronted. Whereas Claude Perrault (1613-1688) ou la Curiosité d’un classique (1988) traces the origin of these changes at the end of the seventeenth century, L’Invention de l’Ingénieur Moderne, L’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées 1747-1851 (1992) envisages their full development from the mid-eighteenth century to the 1850s. Picon has also worked on the relations between society, technology and utopia. This is in particular the theme of Les Saint-Simoniens: Raison, Imaginaire, et Utopie (2002), a detailed study of the Saint-Simonian movement that played a seminal role in the emergence of industrial modernity. Picon’s most recent book, Digital Culture in Architecture: An Introduction for the Design Profession (2010) offers a comprehensive overview and discussion of the changes brought by the computer to the theory and practice of architecture.

Sverker Sörlin is an intellectual historian and professor of environmental history at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He has published extensively on issues such as nationalism, history of science, and environmental history. Of particular interest to the Routes project is his work on the modern concept of nature, such as Naturkontraktet: Om naturumgängets idéhistoria (1991) and Friluftshistoria – Från “härdande friluftslif” till ekoturism och miljöpedagogik, w/Klas Sandell 2000/ 2008). Sörlin has also published significant works on 18th century scientific expeditions, such as the book Linné och hans apostlar, (w/ Otto Fagerstedt, 2004) as well as Narrating the Arctic: A Cultural History of Nordic Scientific Practices, w/Michael T. Bravo, 2002).

Hans Liudger Dienel is a historian, specializing in the history of technology and infrastructure. Dienel is professor at the Technische Universität Berlin, leading Zentrum Technik und Gesellschaft. His publications include Herrschaft über die Natur? Das Naturverständnis deutscher Ingenieure 1871–1914  (1992), Der Optimismus der Ingenieure. Triumph der Technik in der Krise der Moderne um 1900 (1998), Stadt und Verkehr. Informationen zur Modernen Stadtgeschichte (2006), among many other books and articles. Professor Dienel leads the research network T2M, The International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility (http://t2m.org/)

The Routes PhDs are active on many fronts; most recently with the session “Roads to Memory” at the International Society for Cultural History’s Annual Conference History - Memory - Myth: Re-presenting the Past at the University of Oslo on the 4th of August 2011, hosted by the Department of Cultural History and Oriental Languages, and Cultrans. Marie-Theres Fojuth gave the paper “Conceptions of Space: Railway Politics, Nation-building and Landscape Construction in Northern Europe, 1850-1910″, while Kristina Skåden spoke of “Mapping the past/future: Autobahn on display” and Torild Gjesvik on “Old people still remember… Representations of Sarpsfossen” 

The Norwegian Road Museum’s Yearbook for 2010, edited by Geir Paulsrud and Berit Hole, contains five Routes project articles. Mari Hvattum writes a general presentation of the Routes project, while Torild Gjesvik, Janike Kampevold Larsen, Beate Elvebakk and Even Smith Wergeland present examples of the project’s rich material.

In collaboration with Oslo Centre of Critical Architectural Studies (OCCAS) and the Oslo Triennale, the Routes project has organised an open conversation on landscapes and mobility. Three landscape scholars will take part in the conversation: the landscape theorist Christophe Girot from ETH Zurich, architect and landscape historican Alessandra Ponte, from Université de Montréal, and the literary scholar Janike Kampevold Larsen, post doc at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Contemporary representations of landscapes are arguably still concerned with the beautiful, operating within a photographic documentary aesthetics. This talk starts with the question of how to represent and still maintain what is essential to the landscapes of mobility? What terminology could be introduced into the discourse on both territories and contemporary uses and modulations of urban and rural environments? The talk takes place on the 29th September at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design. For the program, go to www.aho.no

The Routes project has been invited to edit a special issue of the international landscape journal ‘Scape: the international magazine for landscape architecture and urbanism. Edited by Janike Kampevold Larsen, ‘Scape 1/2010 has Roads and Landscapes as it topic. In addition to presenting recent roadside projects, the issue contains contributions from landscape scholars and urbanists such as Christophe Girot (ETH Zurich), Karl Otto Ellefsen (AHO, Oslo), Fred Truniger and Pavlina Lucas. Janike Kampevold Larsen and Mari Hvattum contributes from the Routes project itself. The publication has been financed through generous support from the Norwegian Research Council and AHO.

The Routes team is glad to announce that the historian Marie-Theres Fojuth, PhD student at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and affiliated researcher to the Routes project, has received an “Yggdrasil”-grant from The Research Council of Norway for a research stay in Oslo. Fojuth will stay at the University of Oslo, Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS), from August 2010 until May 2011. Fojuth is working on the dissertation “Nation, Region and Landscape in Norwegian Debates on the Railway 1840-1908”, investigating the role of the infrastructure development in the Norwegian nation building process. The project analyzes nation building as the attempt to modify the perception of Norway and Norwegian regions and landscapes – the central thesis is about how the development of the infrastructure should “change” the national territory, and in so doing to consolidate and strengthen the nation. The research focuses on analyzing debates on central railway projects in the Norwegian society between 1840 and 1908, which includes debates in the parliament, the administration, the media and among engineers, the municipal administration and local railway committees.

Two Routes scholars presented papers at the first international meeting of the European Architectural History Network, in Guimarães, Portugal, 17th-20th of June 2010. Janike Kampevold Larsen presented “Desiring Matter” in the roundtable session “Beyond the spatial turn: redefining space in architectural history”. Mari Hvattum presented the paper “The technological beautiful: C. A. Pihl’s railway photography and the domestication of technology” in the session “Architecture in 19th century photographs”. Program and information on the EAHN conference can be viewed here.

Krogkleven paa Ringerike. Chr. Tønsberg, 1848

On June 4th, the Routes project team has invited Charlotte Klonk, art historian from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, to take part in a picture workshop on 19th century landscape imagery. The workshop will take place in the midst of one of the most celebrated vistas of 19th century Norway, namely Kleivstua by Krokkleiva.