Between Richness And Decay: An Interview with Søren Ryge Petersen
How do we experience decay in the city? Usually, we try to avoid it, demolish it, and replace it with something new and shiny. But in some cities, we can be lucky to experience places floating between richness and decay.
How do we experience decay in the city? Usually, we try to avoid it, demolish it, and replace it with something new and shiny. But in some cities, we can be lucky to experience places floating between richness and decay.
By The Empty Square
Søren Ryge Petersen. Photo: The Empty Square
How do we experience decay in the city? Usually, we try to avoid it, demolish it, and replace it with something new and shiny. But in some cities, we can be lucky to experience places floating between richness and decay. It’s never the result of planning strategies; on the contrary, it only grows without our interference.
Beautiful decay provides cities with an extra layer of meaning, reminding us of the natural cycles of birth, death, and rebirth. It reminds us of our roots and the fact that everything is part of a process of transformation. The only constant is change.
This conversation is not about cities. It’s a story of a garden and a yard told by one of Danish television’s grand old men, Søren Ryge Petersen. But the essence is of great relevance to towns and cities: It’s about organic growth and acceptance, even awe, towards the relentless decay accompanying time.
A City That Is Functional In The Spiritual Sense
Imagine a city or a town that, like the Japanese garden, is designed and cultivated in the belief that it may “achieve a beauty that is completely non-decorative but functional in the spiritual sense.”
Imagine a city or a town that, like the Japanese garden, is designed and cultivated in the belief that it may “achieve a beauty that is completely non-decorative but functional in the spiritual sense.”
By The Empty Square
Photo: June Wong/Unsplash
Imagine a city or a town that, like the Japanese garden, is designed and cultivated in the belief that it may “achieve a beauty that is completely non-decorative but functional in the spiritual sense.”*
What would that city look like?
Imagine a city that makes “the eye a transformer of thought’”. A city that aspires to a state beyond the ‘made’ or the ‘designed’. What value does design for the sake of design hold?
In the Japanese garden, the search for meaning, for truth, is active, engaged, fully fledged. The deeper beauty of the garden – or the city, think about it! – resides, according to horticulturalist and brilliant garden designer Sophie Walker, “not in its surface ornament but in its profound search of contact with the original state of nature”.
What if it was the goal of urban design and architecture to somehow connect and align with the deeper, complex structures of nature?
“The acceptance of assimilated layers of meaning naturally gives rise to changeable, shifting and simultaneous possibilities, all of which are acceptable and welcome – and it is perhaps this quality above all else that gives the Japanese garden its greatest potency.”
Does the same go for the living city?
Photo: Cedric Wilder/Unsplash
*Sophie Walker: The Japanese Garden (Phaidon, 2017)
Learnings From A Garden: An Interview With Beata Engels Andersson
This story of a famous garden in Sweden is not about horticulture. It’s about life and death, human needs and capacities, and the power of opposites.
This story of a famous garden in Sweden is not about horticulture. It’s about life and death, human needs and capacities, and the power of opposites.
By The Empty Square
Beata Engels Andersson. Photo: The Empty Square
This story of a famous garden in Sweden is not about horticulture. It’s about life and death, human needs and capacities, and the power of opposites.
It’s told by Beata Engels Andersson, the daughter of the world-famous Swedish landscape architect, Sven-Ingvar Andersson (1927-2007). We met her at Marnas, the family house and garden since 1967.
Beata Engels Andersson. Photo: The Empty Square
It made us reflect on the role of death and decay. The balance between structure and chaos. The importance of generosity, openness, and meeting places.
Not only in our towns and cities but also in our everyday lives.
This masterclass (duration: 17 min.) offers a personal story as well as universal reflections. We hope you will enjoy it.