Casagrande & Rintala
Modern agricultural methods have ensured the demise of
many of the traditional wooden buildings seen on the edges
of the meadow clearings of the forest all over the country's
flat landscape. In these grey little barns, hay was stored,
and animals chosen to live through winter were gathered in
from the ferocious cold -- their less fortunate herd-mates
being slaughtered since there was not enough fodder to
keep them. Now that new industrialized farm structures
and new agricultural techniques have made the old
buildings redundant they are destroyed or simply allowed
to fall down.
Three of these abandoned barns 'were driven,' the
architects explained, to the point where they have had to
break their primeval union with the soil. Desolate, they
have risen on their shanks and are swaying toward the cities
of the south.'
Their structures were put together again and reinforced
internally. Then they were raised 10m high each on four
slender legs of unpeeled pine trunks braced with steel wire
-- and they began to march towards the cities of the south.
The humble had suddenly been given majesty, even a
degree of the sublime.
They were marching to their deaths. In early October,
cords of dry wood were assembled round their legs, and
all was set on fire -- just at the time when the beasts they
housed would have been slaughtered too.
The whole was in many ways a contemporary interpretation
of monument, poetic, moving, its only remaining presence
on film and video.
- WASH issue 4
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