Lynetteholm is Denmark’s largest ever urban development project, but when represented, the time between now and its “final” completion date (2070) is largely ignored. What I’m interested in practicing with this thesis, is how to engage with the indefinite number of changing “nows” in this projected 50-year process.
In the core of this thesis lies a search for alternative methods of and relationships to practicing architecture. This is provoked by the logics behind project-Lynetteholm: of scalability, competition, control and growth-economy.
How could one resist categorisation of practice (can I engage with a huge urban development plan through a small series of situations?), expectations of control (can I propose logics and events that are left open-ended? How far does my responsibility extend? And where should it end, for others to begin to appropriate an idea?), and abstraction (what can't I represent?), without disengaging with the overwhelming urban development trends of Copenhagen and other cities? How can one carve out spaces of hopeful architecture, within such conditions?
This is a practice, in terms of attempting, trying, testing, and is therefore simply evidence of a process rather than a finished result. It is a field of translations, including an audio-walk, a map, a calendar of events, building strategies, and writing, that intend to spark democratic potential around common concerns relating to Copenhagen's urban development. Architecture as a mediating agency.
Practicing in intermediate places means practicing in tension between supporting and subverting the dominating realities we find ourselves in.
↑ the first three stops on the audio-walk, with walking-time omitted, in order to shorten the teaser. An updated version can be experienced as a part of the CAF program in October 2022.
The text for the audio-walk is a hybrid of my own writing, extracts from 'Moveable Estates' by Cooking Sections, and translated texts from Københavns Byatlas read out by Ida Østman. Soundscapes are from Radio Aporee Creative Commons.
The cinema, or kin(o), is the first public invitation to Lynetteholm’s construction- site and along with an audio-walk, intend to provoke Copenhageners’ habitual engagement with the city, probing viewers to really see what is around them rather than approaching space with pre-defined associations. Together, the kin(o) and audio- walk are “stem cell” moments disposed to make certain futures more possible: what one could call a “facilitation cascade”, to borrow a biological term, for incrementally more politically active assemblies. This proposed cascade of events, including: a satellite studio on Lynetten for students, a garden, a weather research-observatory, a culture house for birdwatchers and “naturvenner”, a folkekøkken, and a folkemøde in 2035 (when Copenhagen is projected to be a climate-positive capital), are alternative beginnings for Lynettenholm that attempt to interfere with its slow projection by entangling it within existing ecologies, rather than attempting to design an ecology.
“Time is paradoxical...it folds or twists, it is as various as the dance of flames in a brazier, here interrupted, there vertical, mobile and unexpected.” But then, Serres and [Bruno] Latour have an advantage. They are French, and so use the same word for time and the weather: le temps. This is not a linguistic accident: “at a profound level they are the same thing.” The weather proceeds in a line of successive seasons, but this regularity is continually disturbed by short-term uncertainties (...an Indian summer), instant events (...that sudden downpour), and long-term patterns (...global warming). In the same way the linearity of time as described by the calendar (yesterday, today, tomrorow) is overlaid with cyclical time (day/night, yearly cycles)...it is further complicated by the introduction of the human dimensions of time, both personal (memories and anticipations) and shared (histories and futures).
(Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends)
