Sensuous atmospheres of landscape and memory

Abstract

The sensuous qualities of atmospheres are intimately tied to the landscape’s potency as a place of memory. More than any other design discipline, landscape architecture is bound to place, and the place specificity of atmospheres is a critical component of the experiential landscape. And more than its close ally, architecture,landscape is spatially and temporally fluid. Landscape architecture is rooted to the ground, it is highly responsive to light, moisture, climate, and the intangibilities of memory. Sensuous atmospheres in the landscape offer potential realms for memory. Memory is aligned with a range of senses, of which smell and taste are the most vivid (as with Proust’s madeleines), augmented by sound, sight, and touch. Memories tend to invoke emotions. Past traumatic events, losses of people and places, float in atmospheres of melancholy.Invocations of fondness and longing might flicker and shimmer in nostalgic atmospheres. From a landscape architectural perspective all of this raises intriguing questions about the degree to which an atmosphere can be designed. Can affective atmospheres of nostalgia and melancholy be infused into landscapes? Two projects are explored to probe the possibilities of intentionally invoking atmospheres, exploring how could the landscape be ‘tonalised’ in a particular way. Aspects of diffusion and attunement provide the basis for thinking about shared emotion, and how an intentional (i.e.designed) landscape of memory could invoke a collective affective atmosphere. The first project, The Storm Cone, is by British artist Laura Daly. The project is an augmented reality app which provides an immersive audio-visual experience for the user, through invoking the form and sounds of an English bandstand from the early twentieth century – a quintessentially British landscape atmosphere. I consider the atmospheric potency of the app through my experience of using it in a park in my home city in New Zealand, and explore questions related to how augmented reality might be related to atmosphere, drawing on some of the work related to installation art, augmented reality and sound, as well as landscape-related perspectives. Can a landscape atmosphere be generated through an augmented reality app, and does it provide the setting for a shared emotional experience of a past memory. Can an atmosphere be experienced asynchronously by different app users at different times? The second project is one I have been working on for a number of years in my role as a landscape architect and memorial designer. The project is a memory landscape for the Pike River Mine, which exploded in 2010, killing 29 men. Rather than an ‘accident,’ the site remains a crime scene, as the cause of the explosion is investigated by the police. There is a palpable atmosphere that emanates from the site. Not only from the circumstances of the deaths, but also from a deeper history of local Māori and their own tragic connection to this site. The design of the memorial landscape explores how communication with the dead men has generated a kind of affective dimension to the site, a shared emotion for visitors, an atmosphere. The atmosphere is augmented by the particular qualities of light,moisture and vegetation at the site, which is deep in dense, damp, rainforest. The temporal and spatial fluidity of the landscape raises questions over how, as designers, we can amplify the atmosphere of the site, to intensify visitors’experiences. Through spatially extrapolating the mine into the open air, can we emplace visitors into a ‘force field’ of charged atmosphere? Can the aural aspects of saying the dead men’s names, and becoming attuned to the forest’s sounds offer an atmosphere of loss?