Rurality of ruins

In the eighteenth century, the early preservationists Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and John Ruskin manifested their initial concepts of how to approach what we today know as cultural heritage. These concepts formed the basis of modern restoration, occupying the field with prolonging and upholding, in both theory and practice. Presently, and in line with their approach, the vast majority of safeguarded buildings represents imposing monuments of the distant past.

In contrast, this article reports on a series of alternative preservation attempts developed and tested as the transformation of abandoned buildings undertaken at full scale through a subtractive architectural practice. This practice was initiated in Denmark, aiming at temporary and dynamic preservation strategies for the rural built environment with an emphasis on the involvement of local village communities. The aim was to reactivate obsolete buildings as material anchorage points of personal memories of place, so as to facilitate an exchange of these memories to strengthen the collective memory, and to rebuild community cohesion within the depopulating rural villages.

Thus, the practice differs from the classic notion of cultural heritage practices as the buildings are preserved for those with a personal and geographic relation. Most of the transformed buildings belong to the everyday environment and originate from the recent past, in contrast to most acknowledged monuments.