The Abandoned Society: radical preservation of the rural built environment in Denmark

The paper reports on 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 various rural villages in Denmark utilizing the responses of the local residents as a feedback mechanism.

The section was used as method to reveal several historic material layers of the building simultaneously to unleash a multifaceted interpretation of the entirety of the buildings’ private history. The private past becoming public triggered a local discussion on the merits of the building and the people who used to live there.