Multiple Worlds In Coastal Agger

Multiple worlds in coastal Agger – a narrative essay about the architectural and societal conditions and potentials in the rural landscape village Agger . Worlds of local empowerment, appreciation and awareness of possibilities and potentials through architecture as media and students of architecture as ambassadors for academia in a dynamic time. What can we learn from places like Agger and what is it urbanization leave behind? Are rural communities even relevant to the education of architects?
Through a five-year period from 2017-2021 the Institute of IBBL at the Royal Danish Academy of Architecture in Copenhagen have hosted a three-week field study course for BA-students. The students can choose between extraordinary locations varying from locations abroad to domestic sites like the small coastal community of Agger in Thy, Denmark where I have had the privilege to be responsible for that specific course. We go there to learn from a context that holds immense complexity and great challenges for 3rd year students of architecture and to discover how architecture can create new worlds.
The course takes us to the far outskirts of Danish welfare society and into the very middle of an “unknown” community where architecture students become catalysts of aesthetics and architectural archaeology. It is an attempt to develop the student’s ability and capacity to dive into specific contexts and enable them to create situated projects for the wellbeing and benefit of the given community, to develop an architecturally based language that resonate with the context in all its complexity and to develop relevant answers to challenges in complex times. The course awakens perspectives, creates awareness on everyday lives sometimes hidden qualities and establishes a resonance between art, architecture, academia, and the hyper specific ecologies of Agger.