WEEK 8: AS WE NEAR THE FINISH, A SEARCH FOR COMMON GROUND

“To acknowledge past human impacts upon these islands is not to call into question their wildness; it is rather to celebrate, along with the human past, the robust ability of wild nature to sustain itself when people give it the freedom it needs to flourish in their midst.”

- William Cronon, The Riddle of the Apostle Islands (williamcronon.net/writing/Cronon_Riddle_Apostle_Islands.htm)

After a marathon week of lectures, critiques that stretched the limits of grit and endurance, and the looming urgency of the quarter’s end a mere 3 weeks away, we emerged to find ourselves at a crossroads.

Where do we go from here?

We were in search of a common framework, a common sense of purpose; we were looking for [a]common ground.

This idea – that of San Juan Island National Historical Park as common ground – became a focus of our work for the week, as we broke into final working groups and developed our critiques of business as usual for our park and the National Park System as a whole.

Out of our discussion, a new working group emerged to consider the National Park System in the realm of digital technologies and communication. This group will assess the effectiveness of the site and the system in relation to the digital fluencies and desires of future generations of park users.

Finally, as the studio winds down (or ramps up, as the case may be) we will be working to bring the specificities of our site analysis into a larger conceptual framework – or idea – for the future of the National Park System.

Here, we will need to be reflective with regard to how our local site reflects larger themes across the American landscape, the natural and cultural preservation of which it is the NPS’s charge to uphold.

What does the space of SJINHP tell us about the American experience?

SJINHP offers a message of cultural peace and natural sanctity across a landscape that is common ground for competing narratives, shifting ecologies, histories layered atop the other, stories dens-ifying and dispersing as if buffeted by the swirling winds atop the bluffs and on the beaches of American Camp.

We’ve heard the story of the Pig War, of peaceful arbitration and recognize it as but one of the stories to celebrate here, only one part of the American cultural landscape and we are cognizant of other voices in the midst – the whispers of the Lummi oars and the hot smoke of burning prairies; the plodding and plowing of early American settlers reaping an agricultural bounty; and more recently the encroachment of suburban development along with the whir of the automobile.

We search for space to hold [in]common our [un]common histories; in the landscape we seek the tension of our diverse pasts grounded in the unity of our American democracy.

WEEK 7: STAKEHOLDER SYNTHESIS + DESIGN DIRECTIONS

This polar bear tells a personal story

On Monday, we began the our weekly seminar session with an enlivening presentation and discussion with Kris Morrissey, Director of the Museology Department, Curator of Interpretation. She emphasized that interpretation is the bridge between the visitor and the information. While objects provoke stories, only people can “tell” stories. This is important, as Kris stated that the story is what forges emotional and intellectual connections between the interests of the audience and the meaning inherent in the resources. Her expertise on interpretation is certainly an invaluable resource, and the timing of her visit couldn’t have been more perfect as we begin to consolidate our ideas concerning specific areas and modes of telling stories.

Kris Morrissey from the Museology Department



New groups

After Kris’ time with us, we were tasked with self-aligning into groups based on our 3 new focus themes: Density, Dispersal, and Connections. Within these newly formed groups, our directive was to synthesize what we heard from the visiting jurors at the mid-review and the stakeholders and bring that into a still conceptual framework for moving forward.

Students' designs - NEW or modified NPS logo

Following class Monday, we all pinned up our designs for a new NPS logo, which had been a fun part of our weekend assignment to get our creative sense awakened.


Wednesday began with a class visit to the UW’s Burke Museum where Julia Stein, Curator of the Burke, gave us an amazing presentation. We heard about the museum’s collections related the Park and the work she and her students have done on the sites, which include archeological digs done in the area of the parade ground at English Camp. 

Julia Stein, Curator of the Burke Museum

There was also an informative exhibit entitled: Hungry Planet: What the World Eats. Included in this exhibit was a very thorough and beautiful explanation of the seasonally and geographically varied diet of the Coast Salish People, who have inhabited the San Juan Islanda for thousands of years. We continued studio in work sessions within our new groups, with collaborations and ideas exchanges occurring between groups.

Julia Stein showed us her work and artifacts found on the San Juan Island

On Friday, we had the pleasure to have Keith Dunbar, retired head of the NPS Planning for the Western Region and coauthor of the SJI-NHP general management plan come and give us a presentation on the history and evolution of park planning and policy. Keith stayed to observe and provide feedback on our pin-up session, where our groups presented to the class our ideas for design directions. Many of our creative ideas and potentials for implementation saw similarities and parallels which will inform our direction toward synthesis, editing and clarification in moving forward. 

Keith Dunbar, Retired Head of NPS Planning of our region

The Connection Group presenting their design directions

STAR your favorite "Big Ideas"

WEEK 6: MID-REVIEW + STAKEHOLDER MEETING

This week for the studio began with late nights spent feverish polishing our mid-review presentations, and ended with another site visit to bucolic San Juan Island.  While I believe we all preferred the latter, our mid-reviews came off grandly nonetheless. 

We further distilled our working themes to four groups:  Community + Stakeholders, Site + Program, Heritage + Program, and Setting + Environment.  These groups were, as our professors tasked us, an effort to "move into a more directed apprach for developing strategies to apply the design guidelines to our site and examine their applicability to the larger NPS system."  While moving forward in examining their individual theme, the groups also worked together, sharing ideas and information to devise a framework for decision-making in our design thinking.

Here are a few examples of our work (please note, more examples will be posted in the coming days):



We were fortunate to have as our reviewers both SJI-NHP core staff and high level decision-makers with the Designing the Parks competition.  After a short introduction to our work and process, the four groups presented their boards detailing thoughts and proposals.  A final synthesis presentation discussed overall conclusions, and clued the reviewers in to our direction moving forward.

A fertile discussion followed, with the reviewers urging us to continue pushing and scrutinizing the boundaries of the Park, both physical and metaphorical.  They appreciated all of the data and analysis that was presented, and all - reviewers, students, and professors - agreed that it is now time to bring focus to form. 

After the buzz of mid-review dissipated for a day, we had a second chance to present our work - this time on the Island.  We invited community stakeholders to a public meeting as a way to see what we have been working on, and more importantly to get input from those who have the Park as their local park.  We were all very excited, after working with GIS, historical research, maps, et al. for weeks, to have a chance to have tangible encounters with island residents. 

Steve, Acting Superintendent of SJI-NHP introducing the group

There was a short presentation, and we then broke out into small groups to discuss our work and the residents' thoughts.

At the end of the long week, we blew off some steam in Friday Habor at the Rumor Mill, a live music venue and restaurant.  As the band was backed by a large mural of the windswept prairie at American Camp, we considered our dancing and revelry as research related to the studio.

At the Rumor Mill - with American Camp prairie mural backdrop

The next day, we further explored the Island and the two park sites.  With fresh ideas from our presentations and conversations, the group homed in on how to bring these concepts to spatial reality.  A subset was able to examine the old military road in further detail, and more specifically toured the island with the San Juan Island Trails Committee.

English Camp

English Camp

English Camp

American Camp

American Camp

American Camp

Jakle's Lagoon - American Camp

American Camp

With the quarter a bit more than halfway over, we look forward to focusing more on specific proposals and interventions built upon the base of thorough site analysis and data.

WEEK 5: STEWARDSHIP + COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

To kick off the week, we had an exciting opportunity to work with Jodie Galvan of Forterra (formerly Cascade Land Conservancy) to discuss the process and implications of environmental stewardship. As a Senior Managing Director of Stewardship, Jodie works to ensure that the land managed by Forterra is maintained and restored as needed, a complicated job that involves budgeting for thousands of acres of land in the Pacific Northwest. She emphasized the complexity of this responsibility by asking us to brainstorm a number of critical components of San Juan Island National Historical Park that we will need to take into consideration as we begin making recommendations for the re-design of this site. These components included:

1. Long-term management and maintenance needs, including things that may go wrong and preventative measures
2. Cost per year to run the park
3. How to reduce those costs
4. Non-financially-based benefits of utilizing community volunteers in the park

The estimates for the cost to maintain the park largely exceeded the probable budget. This is where reducing 
costs and community stewardship comes into play. As a class, we agreed that the benefits of utilizing community volunteers extends beyond cost reductions, as it allows for education of the public as well as maintaining old and new partnerships throughout the island community.

On Monday we also had the chance to present the work we produced for our most recent assignment. We had been split into four teams to accomplish a number of goals that allow us to dig a little deeper into the history, site, setting, and program of the park. The history team displayed a montage of histories, including that of the Pig War, the Native Americans, and even the geology of the island and region as a whole. The site team displayed the structure, ecology, and cultural resources of American Camp and English Camp as individual places. This was taken to a broader level by the setting team, who illustrated the land use, ecology, transportation, and tourism aspects of the entire island as it relates to the rest of the region. Finally, the program team explored the earth, water, and human interactions on the island, and identified areas of opportunity for visitors to explore and learn from the park.

After eliciting the broader, more abstract ideas revolving around the various components of the park and island, it is time for us to complete a foundation from which we can begin applying the design principles. The rest of the week was spent working on three main issues: Site and Program, Heritage and Program, and Setting and Environment. Based on the preliminary stages of our exploration of these issues, a main theme among the three teams seems to involve discovering the linkages and commonalities between various narratives, relationships, and physical properties of the park and the island.  By identifying common threads, it will be easier for us to define the needs of the island, the park, the tourists, the residents, the stakeholders, and the natural ecologies.

The heritage + program group brainstorms.

To organize themes, students in the heritage + program and 
site + program groups gather all the different narratives that are 
held within the two camps.

Project management + presentation group begins outlining for the midterm review.

In preparation for the stakeholder meeting on February 10, each student is responsible for contacting community stakeholders on San Juan Island. Organizations and citizens interested in the future of San Juan Island National Historical Park are encouraged to attend. 

WEEK 4: HISTORY, HERITAGE & TOURISM

Let's give 'em something to talk about!

Each week one of our instructors hosts a seminar to “deepen the understanding and discover why where are doing [this studio]” – (Ken Yocom). During these seminars, students are encouraged to freely discuss theories and ideas presented in a set of assigned readings. Apparently we had all had a lot of time to read during last week’s “snow-apocalypse” because the discussion was livelier than ever before! We crammed two huge topics into the hour and a half, touching on Tourism and the difference between History and Heritage.

PhD student and studio instructor, Tyler Sprague, summarized our first set of readings using TIME as the unifying element that ties history together. To illustrate how this can be applied to our site(s), he pointed out that the San Juan Island National Historic Park was founded in 1963 when the Cold War was still fresh in Americans’ minds and the US government was preparing for the Vietnam War. This is an interesting observation considering the mission statement for the park is to “commemorate the historic events associated with the final settlement and peaceful arbitration…” As a class we began theorizing the intentions of the policy makers in creating this park and promoting the idea of peace at that time. We wonder if this drive to highlight on peacefulness is just as pertinent today, with a main park goal being to infuse visitors with a sense of pride, or at least respect, by having a stake in some positive aspect of U.S. history.

Image:This image sparked a discussion about the history of our country and comparing these historical events to the formulatoin of the National Historic Park. We are finding that deciding which histories to reveal while providing an educational and enjoyable park experience, is a tricky balance.

The discussion shifted and we focused on Lowenthal’s article, Fabricating Heritage, and his definition of ‘history’ as an objective truth compared to ‘heritage’ that is understood as a cultural construct merely rooted in history (1). This might first appear too theoretical but museology students chimed in to say that the NPS, and our class, has the opportunity to bind community together by developing a new heritage by pulling out forgotten or ignored information. We continued to admit to ourselves that, although we would like to reveal all of the hidden stories and perspectives of the San Juan Islands, nobody will have “the time, money, or resources to share it all,” (Manish Chalana) – we will have to choose an interpretive theme. And choosing will be yet another puzzle… good thing we have so many minds at work!

Image: San Juan is potent and impressing as both vernacular landscape and a historic site.

As a whole, it seemed that we began to understand the necessity to distill the most pertinent events to comprise this heritage-to-be. We know it will require the cooperation of stakeholders in this land, in giving us their opinions surrounding what theysee as most important to reveal (or not to reveal). This competition project is not solely about what we see as the most pressing details of SJI-NHP, or any National Park for that matter. It is about what the visitors and stakeholders of today and in future generations will be able to effectively apply to their lives. Without a sense of pride in our National Parks, the parks may cease to exist as constructive Heritage Landscapes, which (to quote from one of our previous weekly readings) are “important indicators in the restless search for identity that characterizes Americans as they make the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century.” - Richard Francaviglia (2).

1. Lowenthal, David. "Fabricating Heritage." History & Memory: Studies in Representations of the Past. 10.1 (1998): 5-24. Print.

2. Alanen, Arnold R, and Robert Melnick. Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Print.

WEEK 3: EXAMINATION OF DESIGN PRINCIPLES

It has been an interesting week here in the Seattle area, thanks to Mother Nature’s blast of snow, ice, and rain that knocked out power, public transit, and shut down the University for three full days. Paired with the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday on Monday, we couldn’t meet as a class for an entire week! Our site at San Juan Island National Historical Park was also blanketed in snow.

Images: UW Campus, January 2012. Photo: University of Washington’s Facebook Album, “Huskies Take Winter 2012 by Storm!” , American Camp, January 2012. Photo: San Juan Island National Historical Park's Facebook Album, “Snow Squalls at American”

Despite not being able to make it to campus, students met virtually and over email in order to complete our second assignment. Our work built upon and delved deeper into the six design principles that we addressed last week. First, we synthesized our definitions and then explored ways that these principles have been implemented in three different settings: 1) San Juan Island National Historical Park (SJI-NHP), 2) another NPS unit, and 3) a site outside the NPS system, with a different interpretive agenda. What resulted was an exploration of a wide array of sites, sites that helped us gain an even broader understanding of our core principles.

Reverence for Place: We defined this design principle as the deep awe, respect, and connectedness by a place, experience, idea, or event that transcends a previous understanding. This group identified three “zones” in which people sense this profound comprehension: the root, the heart, and the head. The examination of this design principle in the case study sites (Devil’s Tower National Monument, SJI-NHP, and New Orleans’ Mardi Gras celebration) revealed both successful strategies and avoidable pitfalls.

Engagement of all People: This principle examines the act of inviting collaboration with individuals and stakeholders in order to represent the broad spectrum of Park qualities on a variety of levels. By looking at their selected sites The Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience (Seattle), People Make Parks (Seattle), Sand Dunes National Park, and Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, they found there are many ways that people can engage with a site, including on local, regional, and global scales, and across time. Each level of involvement engages different modes of learning, accessibility, and participatory experiences.

Advancement of Sustainability: This principle engaged sustainability (a broad term) through ecological literacy. This group found that the leadership of a site or organization directly influences different actions (or inaction) of sustainable practices, as evidenced by the study of The National Trust, Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, and of course, SJI-NHP.

Expansion Beyond Traditional Boundaries

‘Expansion’ implies a singular manipulation of a boundary, and that the boundary will still exist. We chose to rephrase this design principle: redefining traditional boundaries. This change to the principle allows for a multi-modal approach to boundaries related to SJI-NHP, including actions such as expansion, reinforcement, blurring, breaking, contracting, or overlapping. Boundaries can be divided into two frameworks: social and spatial.

Sites: Alcatraz Island, The EMP Museum, Acadia National Park, and Everglades National Park

Informed Decision Making: As a principle, this process occurs in the understanding of the interests at stake; the hierarchy of information supporting a given course of action; and the processes that turn information into actionable strategies. This group found this to be true with Ebey’s Landing National Historic Reserve, Padilla Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, as well as our own Park of study.

Integrated Research, Planning, Design and Review Process: This process should be a collaborative and iterative process among NPS and the community to guide the evolution of SJI+NHP. An integrated approach will ensure that our developments are congruent with overarching design principles, as well as SJI+NHP’s foundation statements, cultural and geographic resources, and needs of stakeholders. The selected sites were specifically the San Juan Island Prairie Restoration, the Grand Teton National Park, Craig Thomas Discovery and Visitor Center, as well as Open Space Seattle 2100.

Visitor Experience: This design principle was added as a result of our discussion in Week 2, felt to be a necessary component of our design. This group found that choice is a key component of visitor experience. We will integrate this component by creating opportunities for active and passive enjoyment, engagement, and reflection on the park’s unique character, while allowing a range of choices that ultimately encourage the visitor to determine the nature of their own visit. The sites examined were the Grand Teton National Park Discovery and Visitor Center, Kolumba Museum, Cologne, Germany, Colonial National Historic Park, and the Louisiana Museum of Art, Denmark.

A Brief Literature Review

In addition to our examination of the design principles, our class read several selected readings to assist our discovery, specifically in the area of heritage and history. As a National Historical Park, history and our engagement with it, plays a large role in our process.

"Fabricating History" by David Lowenthal emphasizes the important differences between history and heritage:

“…heritage should not be confused with history. History seeks to convince by truth, and succumbs to falsehood. Heritage exaggerates and omits, candidly invents and frankly forgets…Time and hindsight alter history, too…heritage not only tolerates but thrives on historical error. Falsified legacies are integral to group identity and uniqueness…”[1]

Albeit a pessimistic view that we often conveniently forget facets of history that are less than becoming, does this mean that we can never do the past justice? Not necessarily. Other historic sites like the Mount Rushmore National Memorial and the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument are taking active steps to tell a broader narrative across time and cultures. This article is an important reminder to us as we envision the future of San Juan Island Historical Park as one that includes the rich and diverse history and heritage of the site.

Other readings addressed the impacts of history and heritage on cultural and vernacular landscape.

The National Park Service defines a historic vernacular landscape as follows:

“a landscape that evolved through use by the people whose activities or occupancy shaped that landscape. Through social or cultural attitudes of an individual, family or a community, the landscape reflects the physical, biological, and cultural character of those everyday lives. Function plays a significant role in vernacular landscapes.” http://www.nps.gov/hps/tps/briefs/brief36.htm

Susan Carrette Boyle adds that vernacular landscapes illustrate “people’s values and attitudes toward the land, and reflect patterns of settlement, use and development.” She argues that including an understand of vernacular landscape adds an important level of nuance needed to protect and preserve landscapes.

We hope to build on this nuance in the week ahead, as we move ahead and begin considering the history and narratives that are visible at the San Juan Island National Historic Park.

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[1] David Lowenthal, “Fabricating History,” History and Memory, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 5-24.

[2] Boyle, Susan C. "Natural and Cultural Resources: The Protection of Vernacular Landscapes." In Cultural Landscapes: Balancing Nature and Heritage in Preservation Practice, Richard Longstreth, 150-163. St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.