We’re trying to keep this thing they call “climate change” out of our city
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Ariana Zilliacus, Intitut for Bygningskunst og Kultur. Political Architecture: Critical Sustainability Det Kongelige Akademi Garden has roots in an Old-English word for fence (gard), revealing its origins in the act of enclosing a region of land. A garden is a garden in relation to an open space without a known end, or what we often call landscape. Landscape is a word some architects and landscape architects are currently trying to outphase from their vocabulary because of its entangled history with a distancing human gaze, seeing ourselves apart from the ‘natural’ world and hence able to look at it, rather than from within it. In Soul, an animated film about living and dying, the phenomena of searching for something without realising that you already find yourself in it is described through a short fable: one fish says to another fish, “I’m trying to find this thing they call ‘the ocean,’” to which it gets the response, “The ocean? That’s what you’re in right now.” “This?” says the first fish, “This is water. What I want is the ocean!”
KÅRK NO. 41
It’s an endearing story to us who can relate to both the ‘water’ and ‘the ocean’ at once, but through stringing some parallels between the fish and ourselves, it probes another perspective on our desires for, for example, ‘nature’, or ‘the good life’. One could almost imagine some fourth-dimensional life forms giggling at our exasperation: ‘this is man-made. What I want is nature!’ The view shaping the fish’s perspective on water vs. ocean could also be exhibited through a desire to escape, rather than to find the ocean: ‘I’m trying to keep this thing they call “the ocean” out of my water.’ A funny statement because it sounds rather absurd, but is it much different to: ‘we’re trying to keep this thing they call “climate change” out of our city’? Cities have historically often been walled, keeping ‘threats’ out and ‘civilisation’ in. Copenhagen is no different, with its former ramparts (volde) still shaping public spaces in the city (e.g. Christiania, the lakes, Vestvolden). These ramparts1 were more precisely mounds of earth piled up as walls and dug away as ditches, later filled with water, to make it as difficult as possible for unwanted beings to cross. In the case of Lynetteholm, a projected circa 3.7 km storm surge barrier branching out from Lynetten and Refshaleøen, and stretching towards Nordhavn in a circular arc (as seen from above), the earthy, sandy, stone wall is keeping the weather out.
Domestication is always a violent, forced act: humans become fully dependent on the plants and animals they master, and plants and animals, through selection, become fully dependent on humans’ care. Evidently, as an architectural type, the garden is a controversial product heavily burdened by the class, gender and racial dynamics used to naturalise hierarchies. However, gardening as a practice still promises opportunities for empowerment: to recognise the limits and implications of domestication, to understand and own the inherent conflict between control and care which arises every time a human tries to adapt a piece of land to their intentions. A garden is always the product of a project and therefore seldom a collective pursuit… there is always a gardener who projects their world vision onto a piece of land. (Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria Giudici, Gardeners’ world: a short history of domestication and nurturance) Lynetteholm is fundamentally an infrastructural project designed to prevent flooding in central Copenhagen, an expected consequence of predicted “100-year” storm surges. The narrow mouth between the edge of Lynetteholm and Nordhavn would be shut in the event of such a storm, so that the waves rolling in from Øresund hit a long barrier of rocks that ‘break’ the waves and dissipate their forces, rather than pushing into Copenhagen’s harbour and eventually flooding the asphalt-covered earth. Lynetteholm is a border with familial relations to the walled garden, which, by keeping threats out, can maintain the performance of paradise within. Paradise (which itself derives from Persian paridaidam: ‘walled (enclosure)’), is a narrative humans have historically created of places of stability and prosperity, and in the case of the Garden of Eden, a place without the burdens of knowledge (so Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden after eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil); today this paradise might be likened to a place without the anxiety of climate change, migration, inequality and decay. In the case of the walled garden, the illusion was primarily achieved through the erasure, or limitation of visual perception; the wall literally erased certain views from the wandering human’s perspective…”out of sight, out of mind.” Lynetteholm on the other hand is perhaps less