Title: "The Climate of Pilgrimage"
The Climate of Pilgrimage is about the tensions and conflicts between preservation, authenticity, commodity, and spirituality embedded in contemporary landscapes of religious pilgrimage. The work investigates how landscape architects can and should participate in the evolution of these heritage landscapes in the present and future dynamism propelled by climate change. The project responds to the questions and crises facing religious pilgrimage landscapes by applying landscape architectural methodologies to the case study of the Camino de Santiago, a centuries-old network of pilgrimage routes culminating at the shrine of St. James in Santiago de Compostela.
Rather than proposing a single, unified intervention, this project identifies three “flashpoints” along the Camino Francés and responds to the layered realities of each using different landscape architectural methods. Together they function as fragments of a larger landscape imaginary, testing how design might reveal and reshape the Camino’s contested present and uncertain future. The work comprises a myriad of approaches to designing in these contested sites and telescopes between on-the-ground and global-scale implications.
