30 June: Rikke Juul Gram
TIME: 30 June 5.00-17.00h
START: Dronning Louise’s Bridge, Copenhagen K
CATEGORY: Landscape architect
Live-stream every hour on the hour on www.facebook.com/walkingcopenhagen
Thought:
Neighbourly relations between city and countryside are each other’s prerequisites. If we lose connection to nature, we lose root in ourselves.
During the spring lockdown of the community and the ensuing assembly ban, we felt how the city’s public spaces and parks are under pressure.
There is simply not enough room for citizens to breathe freely, and especially not at a distance from our fellow human beings.
When you can no longer find enough space in the city for neither yourself nor each other, then the connection to the landscape must be opened as an invitation – the second option.
Action:
Every hour, three small beech trees are planted in a row on 12 selected locations. The trees are picked up in the East Jutland forests, where Rikke comes from, and connects the route as an open avenue showing the way to the west out of Copenhagen.
The trees are a gift for the selected places and boroughs that are passed along the way. The planting site is marked so that the residents of the area have the opportunity to find, and perhaps water, the trees.
Rikke starts the walk early Tuesday morning, alone.
But as the country and the city have now been opened to physical presence, various people will join her along the way.
A journalist, a CEO, a cultural communicator, a restaurateur, an artist, a student, an architect, an urban planner, a space specialist, a city architect.
Along the way, they plant trees every hour and talk about the longing for greener cities, the connection between city and countryside, and where we come from, our roots, and what significance they have for a life in the capital.
The walk ends in Porsemosen 20 km west of Copenhagen.
DOCUMENTATION JUNE 30
FILM
05.00 h
06.00 h
07.00 h
08.00 h
09.00 h
09.30 h
10.00 h
11.00 h
12.00 h
13.00 h
14.00 h
15.00 h
16.00 h
17.00 h
18.00 h – 1
18.00 h – 2
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Rikke Juul Gram is a trained architect and has for the past 20 years practiced in the field of urban and landscape architecture, strategic and spatial planning, infrastructure and cultural heritage.
She is co-owner and creative director of the Schønherr design studio and is responsible for concept and design development for competitions and development projects.
Rikke Juul Gram is a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts as well as the international organization Academy of Urbanism and also acts as a professional judge at architectural competitions as well as examiner at the country’s architectural schools.
She periodically participates in the public debate in the belief that landscape architecture and changes in public space should be discussed as a common and interpersonal matter.
Her approach to the architectural profession is that the city and the natural and cultural values of the landscape are a common heritage that must be managed with care. But at the same time, this heritage holds great potential as tools that can form part of balanced solutions to today’s major societal challenges: transforming the country’s industrial ports into new neighbourhoods, climate adaptation and coastal protection, establishing a green energy production, sustainable food production, rural development, nature and increased biodiversity.
The best solutions are found when the rational is combined with the beautiful – that makes beautiful sense.