Mount Tremper: The Artifice and the Sublime - Landscape, Threshold, and Dwelling

Harvard GSD

This studio examines the Catskills as a landscape already dense with cultural, aesthetic, and ecological meaning. Its identity has been shaped by nineteenth century discourses of the sublime, the Hudson River School, and Transcendentalism. In the absence of European architectural antiquity, American artists like Thomas Cole transformed wilderness into a cultural monument, making mountains and forests vehicles for national identity, spirituality, and environmental consciousness. This lineage,…