An Encounter with Stone: designing with the aesthetic force of post-mining landscapes

Quarries are inherently complex situations that offer a unique and timely challenge to contemporary landscape architects. Their inherently technical and operational nature tends to lead to an equally technical response by designers at the expense of engaging with the ethico-aesthetic potential of these confronting landscapes. Several designers and thinkers are responding to this problem through theorizing a revival of aesthetics that focuses on determining why certain landscape encounters occur, in order to use this as the basis to design from. While attention has been given to theorizing the role of aesthetics in a contemporary design setting, less so has been directed to the practices and techniques suited to designing with these forces or doings. This paper uses the Horokiwi Quarry in New Zealand as an example to explore how the aesthetic forces can be understood as emerging from concrete spatiotemporal relations between the body and landscape. In doing so, it argues that greater attention needs to be paid to the specific, not generic, causes of aesthetic encounters so that stronger, more sustainable relations with non-human entities can be developed.