Wilderness & Exodus: The Production of National Landscape

Wilderness & Exodus explores the construction of new languages of national identity and ecology in the anthropocene by reimagining the Trans-Canada Highway as Canada’s next national park. The design approach proffers an alternative to current national park design methods, which reinforce a binary nature-as-other mentality. Instead, it recognizes and includes anthropomorphic biomes (anthromes) as ecologically significant landscape types, generating spatial experiences which implicate and involve human ecological processes. 

A master plan delineating a new moving border, along with five roadside viewing areas along the highway transect, reframe a continuum of representative anthromes between the protected nature of Banff National Park, and the urban nature of the City of Calgary. 

The transformation of the highway from a former vector of wilderness exodus into a place for registering new perceptions and experiences of nature, enables visitors to become agents of positive change in the production of a new national landscape.