The unseen heritage of the everyday environment: Re-building community cohesion of an abandoned rurality

In contrast to classic restoration practices based on prolonging and upholding, this paper reports on a series of fulfilled, and on-going, temporary preservation attempts. These were developed and tested as radical preservation of abandoned buildings undertaken at full scale through a subtractive architectural practice.
At first, the practice was initiated in Danish rural villages, testing temporary preservation strategies for the challenged rural built environment with emphasis on engagement with the local village communities. The intention was to re-activate obsolete buildings as material anchorage points of place-specific collective memories and thus, contribute to the rebuilding of the community cohesion and local identity.