På Raets Brodd: Breaking the hermeneutic circle of tourism in peripheral landscapes

Abstract

Increasing mass tourism in peripheral landscapes places growing strain on fragile ecological and cultural environments. Architecture that caters to tourism often promotes standardised ways of encountering landscapes through predefined viewpoints and curated experiences. Within the experience economy, landscapes are increasingly reduced to consumable images – a condition reinforced by what Urry and Larsen (2011) describe as the hermeneutic circle of tourism, where visitors arrive with pre-formed images derived from media and seek their confirmation in the landscape. Existing tourism infrastructure tends to close this circle by following a single narrative and staging a frontstage image of place while not considering the multifaceted complexity that lies behind it. This thesis asks how architectural intervention in peripheral landscapes can break the hermeneutic circle rather than reproduce it, shifting the visitor encounter from the confirmation of a prior image toward a bodily engagement with the backstage reality of place. The project is located at Mølen in Larvik, which contains the most prominent part of the Scandinavian terminal moraine. Mølen holds geological, cultural, ecological, and recreational significance, functioning as a protected landscape, hiking destination, and tourist attraction. It became part of the UNESCO Global Geoparks network in 2008. While the Geopark aims to promote geological heritage and sustainable development, current site infrastructure primarily supports short-term visitation structured around the scenic stone beach, leaving the site’s deeper layers of significance often overlooked by visitors.

The thesis adopts a research-through-design methodology based on prolonged site immersion, and sequential mapping, producing a site encyclopedia that informs the architectural proposal. The outcome is a spatial sequence of thresholds distributed across the site, conceived as a journey through geological time, cultural memory, and ecological fragility. Rather than explaining the site through didactic display, the intervention makes these layers legible through spatial design, using walking and sequential thresholds as the primary mechanisms through which the hermeneutic circle is broken. The thesis contributes to discussions on tourists’ perceptions, especially regarding how architectural attractions in landscapes shape tourists’ encounters with place.