Preservation through Community, Subtraction, and Decay

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.

Since 2020, the preservation practice has engaged a larger scale. It now revolves around the on-going preservation of the entirety of a depopulating station town. On the landscape scale, the preservation practice combines a governmental afforestation plan with redirected government funds for strategic demolitions. The afforestation takes place by expanding an existing forest south of the station town into depopulated areas. The forest emerges gradually into the abandoned gardens, in which the buildings are reduced to curated ruins through subtractive interventions.

The curated ruins maintain clearings in the emerging forest and will gradually interweave with a dynamic mesh of pathways made by the community itself. The clearings constitute culture-historical gathering points that catalyst exchange of memories among the local residents and hence, preserve the buildings immaterially as a strengthened collective memory while their physical presence diminishes.