Catalyzing the Parkway: Botanical strategies for the Blue Ridge Mountains

Selected images

Before and after. Rather than preserving a 469-mile perspective view, a dynamic approach to preservation transforms the ‘view’ into a contemporary notion of picturesque based on performance.
The Blue Ridge Parkway runs 469 miles through the Blue Ridge Mountains, connecting Shenandoah National Park to the north with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to the south.
A series of topographic typologies and their respective land management strategies serve as a catalyst for both ecological processes in the landscape, and the transformation of the parkway typology itself.
This transformation of parkway and landscape is revealed through the nodes of intersection between both systems: the scenic overlook and parking pull-offs located along the roadway. Here, the dynamic nature of the mountain landscape is exposed, transforming both the viewing experience and the idea of preservation.
The new management strategies are deployed along the target area of parkway in response to topography and use. Each strategy has a topographic register of the process being explored.
The new management strategies are deployed along the target area of parkway in response to topography and use. Each strategy has a topographic register of the process being explored.
The new management strategies are deployed along the target area of parkway in response to topography and use. Each strategy has a topographic register of the process being explored.
Milepost 365 — Craggy Gardens Visitor Centre Accelerated landscape with newly developed visitor orientation and amenities
Milepost 355 — Ridge Junction overlook and Mt Mitchell State Park exit Stabilized landscape with newly developed utility services and management dispatch

About

[The parkway] is a good road, a road that does not fight the mountains — their geography, geology or history — but rather follows their every twist and turn, every ascent and descent. The parkway never seems and intruder among these mountains.

—Harry Middleton, “The Good Road of the Blue Ridge,” Southern Living (1985)

In 1985, for the Blue Ridge Parkway’s fiftieth anniversary, Southern Living magazine put out a cover story in the September issue, describing the essence of the scenic parkway and praising its harmonious relationship with the mountainous landscape. The narrative presented in Middleton’s article reflects a commonly held perception amongst parkway visitors, however this harmonious and idyllic pastoral aesthetic is not the result of touching the ground lightly, as has been described, but rather, it is a thoroughly constructed landscape experience, produced through the combination of recreational motoring and aggressively nationalistic heritage tourism. The physical parkway was the product of a large operation of cutting and moving mountains to fit a route ultimately determined by political will.

Located at the site of friction between an aggressive rhetoric of cultural heritage and the entropic nature of mountain landscapes, Catalyzing the Parkway considers the repercussions of the layered history of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The project engages both the inherent structure of the regional landscape, and the established structure of the National Park Service through a landscape design strategy based on the botanical properties of both the Rhododendron maximum and the Cephalanthus oxidentalis. While the Blue Ridge Parkway and its ancillary landscape have become stagnated in a regime of nationalistic heritage tourism, this project proposes an alternative to the 469-mile-long pastoral perspective. A newly engaged experience of the parkway and Blue Ridge Mountains is created by preserving the heritage parkway as a contemporary archeological ruin—acknowledging its history and revealing the controls, weaknesses, and frictions in the landscape—and simultaneously providing access and amenities for the contemporary visitor through the overlay of a new parkway system and reactivation of the landscape.

Through a strategy of topographic and programmatic interventions, Catalyzing the Parkway proposes a new approach to preservation based on dynamic mountain processes, and in doing so, transforms both the landscape itself, and the parkway typology by way of both its viewshed and the parkway corridor. Thus, these subtle interventions catalyze fundamental shifts in perception and understanding of the regional landscape, redefining the static notion of picturesque upon which the parkway was founding, into a contemporary notion based on performance and edification.

Acknowledgements

This project was awarded Harvard Graduate School of Design's Landscape Architecture Thesis Prize, 2012.

Related Projects