Grandmother’s Garden is an immersive, multi-part experience designed as an educational exercise for Dollywood, in which guests are whisked back into the realm of memory and consider themes of connection, legacy, and how small acts of kindness can grow. It explores how flat rides (in this case an Intamin Flying Island) can be used to create moving storytelling experiences and how theme park storytelling itself can feature stories that go beyond an action adventure where something goes wrong.
Documents
Thesis / Design Justification & Process
Overview
We enter the attraction through a museum / visitor center (the attraction gift shop) for the fictional town of Evergreen – drawn from the real life history of the nearby ghost town, Elkmont. The facade promises a ride on an incline railway to the former site of “Grandmother’s Garden”.
In line, we learn via exhibits that long ago, facing the aftermath of a logging town that had logged all it could, a woman known only as Grandmother suggested building a community garden. It soon attracted visitors from all over and the town thrived. However, the town couldn’t agree how to tend it and the garden and thus the town fell into disrepair and were abandoned. All that remain’s today is the ruins of Grandmother’s Cabin.
We board the incline railway funicular and it takes us up the mountain to the ruins of the town. Onboard, an announcer again relates the history of the town: how sad it was lost.
Abandoned chimneys from cabins long gone line the second part of the queue as we exit the funicular and venture into the woods
We approach the remains of Grandmother’s Cabin, where the garden is assumed to have once been.
We approach the remains of Grandmother’s Cabin.
We wind around a vegetable garden that, surprisingly, is still growing with the help of an interesting watering contraption that guests must wind to operate.
We enter the cabin through the kitchen.
The interior of the cabin is in disrepair. An old radio plays an interview of Grandmother from back in the day. The announcer sounds eerily similar to the one on the railway. He asks her what the secret is to the town’s success and she replies “you must listen to the garden.” This phrase triggers a transformation. The cuckoo clocks scattered around the room come to life and begin to wind backwards.
The decades of rot melt away as the cabin becomes how it must have looked long ago (via scrims and projection mapping). Voices of memory welcome us but tell us the story we’ve heard is not complete. They ask us to come back into the realm of memory to hear the full story.
The grandfather clock in the corner transforms to becomes a portal to this realm.
We venture into the realm of time and memory
And find an odd structure awaiting us.
We take a seat. Is this the old viewing platform for the garden? Screens on the windows show us a sepia version of the garden falling into disrepair. We hear the arguments of the community, the empathy, compassion, and listening grandmother displayed, and how that healed the community. The trellis collapses and then rebuilds. In a grand climax, Grandmother tells us that as long as we listen to each other every day, like a clock that must be wound, or a garden that must be watered, it is never truly lost. It will blossom and thrive and transform. Look and see what a beautiful garden can grow!
As she says this, the screens disappear (transparent OLED combined with electrochromic glass), and we find ourselves high in the air, looking over the park, the smoky mountains, and the entire community. The voices of memory tell us the town was not lost, it changed, they, along with other towns, created the Smoky Mountain national park, and the area blossomed into everything you see today, including Dollywood.
We come back to the ground and find ourselves in the remains of the old garden, beautifully alive and thriving.
We’re given cardboard “seeds” as we exit. Printed on seed-embedded paper, each suggests ways for each of us to listen to each other and get involved in our own communities.
We head back through the woods, blossoming with life, and find ourselves back at the funicular, as if the whole experience never happened.
On our way down, the story told on the funicular is slightly different. We have heard the memories of the town, and now their story lives on. The announcer remarks that the way they see it, the town didn’t die, it blossomed.
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