No. 1
Dinesen Reader
editorial, printing, book design
2025
Since 2019, Dinesen and The Royal Danish Academy of Architecture in Copenhagen, have collaborated on an annual summer school in the small village Vrå in Southern Jutland, Denmark.
The Summer School of 2021 themed Urbi et Orbi initiated the process of turning an existing farm property into a residency space. The prospects of the project eventually led to the establishment of ORBI — an association formed by participants and teachers of the Summer School — to independently host other seasonal schools: a Spring School for alchemy and gardening, a Harvest School for agriculture and landscape, a Winter School for visual communication, and lastly the 5th Season, a school for no particular profession, and capable of incorporating the unexpected.
In passing at ORBI, the fast solutions greet the slow. A will to cross the stream to collect water — to build with trunks of trees cut down by hand, to produce one’s own bricks, to dig a hole in the ground — coexists with an inclination towards nail-on plates and other clever devices found in the hardware store’s department for global trash. Add a strong fondness for gimmicks.
—Anna Gerstoft, ‘ORBI’s Outline,’ in ORBI’s Summer Schools on Architecture, 2025, p. 3.
In other words, it has to stay strange. Strange doesn’t mean impractical, useless or invaluable, spectacular. A cabin can, as it has turned out, lend itself to many purposes, didactical, social, recreative purposes. But if we reduce it to pure purpose or didactic example, then it no longer supports a rural wondering that could be shared by the tourist and the hermit. To wonder is also to ask. It is an attentiveness and a responsiveness that implies particular forms of relations.
—Peter Møller Rasmussen, ‘Year of the Cabin,’ in ORBI’s Summer Schools on Architecture, 2024, p. 60.