The Orchard
The Orchard is Krupinski/Krupinska´s proposal for the Commoning Kits exhibition (curated by Kjellander Sjöberg) at Form/Design Center in Malmö. Thirteen Nordic architecture studios were invited to make proposals for new types of public spaces. The proposals were made for Sege Park, a former hospital and park area from the 1930s. Each office was assigned an area within Sege Park and a specific theme for the proposal. Krupinski/Krupinska was assigned an existing apple orchard and the theme religion.
Exhibition text:
Silently the apple orchard levitates above the ground. Often entirely still, but sometimes the wind can make it, almost imperceptibly, rock to the side. Only a careful watcher will notice this calm movement. Everyone else will tend to think about other things. For instance, the intense football game taking place on the ground. It is a hot – almost stifling – summer day, but under the orchard it is shady and cool. The running has made the players hot anyway, and their presence in the game makes it impossible for them to see anything other than the events on the field. The wind only provokes them, in shooting at the goal, to think about the strange and unexpected movements of the ball.
The morning that the apple orchard slowly rose from the ground to the sky, everyone rubbed their eyes. Nobody believed what they saw was possible. Neither the child, the scientist, the artist nor the idiot could explain what had happened. And although it began as something frightening, almost unbearable, the orchard slowly came to spread a calm that was difficult to understand, like a sense of security. Perhaps because the failure to understand was something they did together.
Earlier, the orchard, when it was still attached to the ground, had been a popular spot for the locals. Many made excursions there, spent entire days in the shade of the trees, ate apples and played in the grass. Some had given it the name Paradise. Now, elevated above the ground, it had become even more like a divine garden.
In the beginning the orchard remained at the same height above the ground. But after a while it started to slowly move both up and down. In this way different spaces came to be created between the orchard and the ground, each with a character of its own. The people were initially suspicious, but in time they came around to it. Slowly and carefully they began to approach the spaces, until with increasing confidence they began to determine what they could be and how they could be used.
At some point the orchard sunk to a mere few meters above ground, but always beyond reach. Like a cloud in movement.
Although the orchard on the ground had been popular, only a few miss it. A shrinking group of people remembers it, and from the ground it cannot be grasped, other than through the still orderly rows of apple trees. Some are surprised by the fact that the orchard’s trees and grass don’t grow. They wonder if nature no longer needs to be tamed. But most think about the space created under the orchard. Or rather the many spaces.
Because the orchard keeps changing height, almost like it understands the inner desires of the people. Sometimes it creates low spaces that invite intimate encounters. At other times open spaces reminiscent of the infinite. Or the unattainable.
