The Abandoned Building becoming Collective Memory: - Radical Transformation as catalyst for the Immaterial Preservation of the Rural Built Environment in Denmark

At the moment most of the countries in the western world are experiencing severe demographic changes. The population in the rural areas abandon their home villages and move into the cities. Thus, the rural villages in Denmark face abandonment and decay.

Despite the good intentions, today’s widespread strategic demolition projects, undertaken in the Danish rural villages, generally emphasize the fast eradication of local identity under the guise of state-authorized clean-up projects. Therefore, there is urgent reason to enable the public discourse with a more nuanced view on abandoned rural houses and in particular, on their bearing on the community cohesion.

An attempt is made to establish a counter-practice of radical preservation in cooperation with rural municipalities and residents, as an alternative to strategic demolition.

This paper reports on the latest of six generations of building transformations prototyped at full scale in rural villages and the local discussions it triggered.
This prototype was implemented in summer 2016 as an event-based transformation of an abandoned confectionary into a theatre installation. It constituted a temporary catalyst for a local exchange of memories of the building and the place. In short, the building was immaterially preserved as part of the collective memory before its demolition.