The Forgotten World

New Zealand has many abandoned rural landscapes that were once thriving pioneering settlements in the early 1900s. Many of the settlements were eventually abandoned due to the harsh conditions and economic decline.This design research project investigates the importance of decaying artefacts abandoned in these rural landscapes that represent the loss of people’s livelihoods in remote New Zealand regions – abandoned tractors, rusted fuel tanks, broken cattle troughs and the like. Most conservation authorities would remove these objects since they are decayed and ‘not part of the natural landscape’. This investigation argues that they have become important parts of the landscapes and that they represent an important chapter in the evolution of the landscapes’ histories. This thesis investigation proposes that by safeguarding these decayed and abandoned artefacts – and by ‘curating’ them along a hiking trail – visitors and locals alike will awaken to their touching beauty, and how they contribute to stories of struggle, loss, pride and determination. This investigation argues that a hiking trail in rural New Zealand should do more than just be defined by Department of Conservation (DOC) markers and observation posts. There are essential tales of the landscape to be remembered all around New Zealand, narratives to be told. Landscape architecture can incorporate such narratives into the landscape as important elements that invite personal reflection as well as becoming a new approach to ‘trail markers’. Decayed and abandoned artefacts can be viewed as points of interest along with a region’s scenic vistas; the two can be ‘curated’ together along a trail, to ensure visitors understand that together they tell a common story. New amenity blocks located along the trail can be designed to actively provide a third contribution to this narrative. By designing these amenity blocks with a unified yet evolving vocabulary, they can create a framework for the narrative that encourages people to understand it as a unified tale. These new amenity blocks will provide opportunities for rest and reflection, but most importantly they will represent an integration of the natural and man-made. A principal objective of this research investigation is to discover ways that man-made elements in the landscape (whether they are decaying artefacts or new amenities) can be fundamentally understood as participants of that landscape, enriching it, fulfilling it, and awakening our understanding of the New Zealand landscape. The DOC typically provides lookouts at the most scenic points of a landscape, but this investigation argues that it is equally important to show visitors that some sites they would not normally think of as interesting and unique actually are some of the most ‘beautiful’ in New Zealand. By actively drawing new visitors to abandoned, rural landscapes, the economy of these sites is enhanced. Most importantly rich histories are no longer lost to their landscapes, but incorporated into them. This factor is at the heart of what it is to be a New Zealander, where our relationship to our landscape defines us