Passing time: a phenomenological approach to heritage design

Abstract

"It's a debate that's been bubbling among Akaroa's townsfolk for 130 years. Should the 4.9ha Garden of Tane (or the Domain, as it was known until 1986) be allowed to return to natives, or should it be restored, in part at least, to what many regard as its glory days in the last few decades of Queen Victoria's reign?”

In response to the apparent conflict between movements to preserve natural or cultural heritage, this dissertation explores time as a design strategy, its use in international heritage sites and the application of these design principles in the interpretation of the Garden of Tane in Akaroa. Intervention within heritage landscapes can make the "passing of time visible [and] also make this passage effecting of further potential". Descombes suggests that to recover something - "a site, a place, a history or an idea - entails a shift in expectation and point of view.” Acknowledging the landscape as part of a 'living process' this study adopts a phenomenological approach to design, engaging perception and imagination in the experiential facets of space and place. Discovery of and a weaving together of the physical and the sensual, the real and the imaginary, the external and the internal, enables designers and planners to integrate the "numerous possible pasts" from which heritage is selected. Principles that enable the changing aspects of a single place to be revealed enhance meaning of the places and the activities of people who use these places without locking them into one romanticized past.