The way we talk about green today is very black and white. Originally in Old English meaning grass and grow, green has become most commonly associated with ‘nature’, ‘the natural’, life and truth. As such, green is often taken as a colour of authenticity, and adopted into numerous political slogans and advertising techniques.
Green, as a concept, was also largely incorporated within the Danish welfare estate model for similar reasons. Taking its form as the landscaped areas, most often referred to as the green-open-spaces, the post-war green ideal brought with it the promise of ‘the good life’. Bellahøj is an example of this narrative. As one of the first post-war housing estates constructed in the 1950’s just north of Copenhagen, Bellahøj consists of 28 towers surrounded by green – an undulating pastoral scene; a familiar depiction of green in accordance to its original Old English connotations.
But as we look closer at and at other times beyond Bellahøj, we can see that the green is not definable by the singularity and grandness of this narrative. Whether embedded in the project from the start, or accumulated over time, the green-open-spaces do not always appear so green, nor do they always hold associations to the root of their derived meaning. There is more to the green than meets the eye.
Today green has grown into a comfortable one-size fits all concept easily adopted to almost anything, but it is its very omnipresence that has become its antithesis. We are so surrounded and enveloped by green that we rarely notice the different structures, shapes and shades that are embedded within its materializations and representations.
This causes the green-open-spaces at Bellahøj to so easily become the background character of both the modernistic developments and our everyday lives. We rarely notice the differences that are embedded within it and as such green appears as a flattened and undifferentiated surface.
My project is a call to challenging the bounds of previously given and confining connotations and conceptions imposed on green-open-spaces of Bellahøj by investigating the ‘thickness’ of green – adopted from anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s ‘thick description’. To do so is to articulate other, alternative, ignored or overlooked, interpretations and adaptations of the green within current understandings of Bellahøj’s green-open-spaces that have resulted from what I claim is being adrift.