Post-Industrial Sites as Canvas (original) (raw)
Inhabiting the Industrial Heritage. Rehabilitation of Industrial Areas into Collective Housing
Industrial Archaeology. European approach to recovery productive memor, 2004
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Urban theory guidelines for handling industrial heritage.
With this research project I want to investigate how urban design theories can be applied to the subject of reconverting industrial heritage. Jean-François Lyotard tells us we should use the history of a place as a source of ideas and discussions for its future. How do we make this true for Brussels Canal zone? How do we treat buildings or urban tissues that were once of great importance to the city? Do we need to preserve the industrial nature of the Canal zone or are there other, more important characteristics in play? The architect no longer builds for ‘the’ human being but for a human being in a certain time, space and context. What is this context for the Canal zone? I answer these questions by accurately extracting the elements of importance out of some important postmodern design theories and applying these elements to the subject of industrial heritage.
Gazi University Journal of Science Part B, 2021
Cities are organisms that expand and transform. This expansion can include industrial sites into the city's organism and create abandoned areas. Adaptive reusing them plays a significant role in the sustainable urbanization goal. However, the interventions in the processes may cause the loss of the regional identity. This study examines the role and interference limit of designers in the adaptive reuse of industrial areas with the focus of creating mixed-functional sustainable structures without loss of the spirit of place. The study uses the case study model as a qualitative methodology. Firstly, the concepts of industrial heritage, adaptive reuse, and sustainable urbanization have been examined as background studies with a literature review. Later on, the paper discusses the role of designers and the intervention limits in adaptive reuse of urbanindustrial areas. In the light of the findings, this issue is classified under three subtitles: preserving the spirit of place, the participatory design process, and creating a new urban focus with cultural development. Lx Factory is examined with a field trip as the case study in the context of becoming a new urban focus and creating a new, creative identity by preserving the existing industrial identity. It is a significant example both in terms of sustainable material use and its relationship with the region. As a result, the study concludes that designers should adopt a participatory design process and an inclusive approach to maintaining the regional identity in the adaptive reuse projects.
Diverse Approaches to Negotiating and Transforming Industrial Architectural Heritage
2022
The Industrial buildings of the 19 th and 20 th century on the outskirts of Athens, Piraeus, Chalkida, Xanthi, Karditsaarchitectural tokens of a violent, sweeping deindustrializationclaim a new life and a new identity. The tobacco warehouse in Xanthi, the soap and pomace oil plant in Chalkida, the old warehouses of the railway station in Karditsa, the fertilizer plant in Drapetsona (Piraeus), the Votrys spirits and alcohol factory in Sepolia (Athens) they are all being transformed and rearranged, acquiring a new form and structure, aspiring to be reintegrated into the urban reality and play a brand new active role in the socio-political scene. This paper presents, through a series of research proposals, distinct ways to approach, manage and negotiate this ready-made and readily available architectural "raw material." It showcases ways to highlight and cross-pollinate past usage and historical memory with a process of reinterpretation, reframing and revitalization of industrial ruins. Understanding architecture as a complex and open activity allows for a degree of compromise and conciliation with the locus, the memory, the material imprints, the history of a city. When the anthropocentric focus takes precedence over practicality, commerciality, the ideology of pomposity and the culture of opulence and technocratic sensationalism; when synthetic gesture allows the integration of tangible and intangible traces of the past to produce new spaces that show care for the collective needs and sensibilities of the citizens and address demands and visions of the community; then the architectural conception is fulfilling its primary role: to be in the core of scientific processes that modify, revitalize and transform the existing urban matter.
1992
My research interests are in the form and design of cities. I perceive and understand form as physical elements, interaction and activities of people, the institution of control and management (political, social, and economical forces), and the various processes by which form is generated, modified and transformed over time. In particular, my interest is in the current theory and practice of "recycling" and reusing dismissed industrial areas into the city fabric. Continuity in our cities is continually interrupted by urban fractures areas with no current function, use, or character due to the loss of relations between physical aspects, social structure of the activities, inhabitants or history of the city. Of these "voids" the abandoned industrial areas clearly represent one of the most important components. Not only are these voids "physical", but most importantly, they are "functional"; they affect the functioning of the city as a whole. Oft...
Adaptive reuse and neglet the current situation of two premises between preservation and renewal
E. Morezzi - Perspectives on Architectural Preservation. Essays 2010-2020, 2020
The article aims at reflecting upon the potentiality of heritage in state of abandonment with regards to large industrial complexes in urban and suburban settings. Indeed, if promotion and preservation strategies appear as the most embraceable towards the conservation of the asset, the current research focuses on alternative strategies, helpful in framing new potential scenarios and intervention guidelines rarely tested in the past. About this, some case study and national as well as international realities have been studied; there, abandonment and mere conservation with no re-functionalization or modification of the architectural components have been preferred to intervention. Against this background, the essay investigates the paradoxical opportunity of not operating on a heritage to achieve its very conservation, implicitly accepting time-related decay and adopting the strategy of minimal intervention on the walls and within the overall conservation strategies.
Enhancing Urban Heritage: Industrial Culture and Cultural Industry
ATHENS JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURE
The rehabilitation of historical centres in Italy offers a vast quantity of experiences, though the concept of preserving urban and architectural heritage is quite recent. In fact the same experience does not find place for industrial districts or areas. The scale of intervention is specific to each case as it deals with single artefacts as well as complex building systems, open spaces and urban closeness. The heterogeneity of adopted methods is a result of diverse contextual conditions and, perhaps above all, diverse urban policies. An initial distinction must be made between Monument and Document, thus distinguishing two levels, both equally relevant to the preservation of the identities of a site, though of widely varying origins andquite oftendiverse physical, formal and functional consistency. This text will examine primarily those aspects related to urban morphology, looking at buildings by means of the Vitruvius paradigm: firmitas, utilitas and venustas. These notions will, however, be subordinated to superior levels of programming. Political choices determine what can be pursued, while economic strategies indicate the limits of each intervention; last but not least is the notion of environmental sustainability in its broadest meaning that encompasses issues of energy, economics, function, technology and, above all, society. We will attempt to further narrow the field by considering the rehabilitation of a complex industrial district: the first methodological choice concerns the type of analysis (the reading) adopted to acquire notions useful to the development of a concept design. Architectural debate, in particular in Italy, was witness to the articulated development of diverse positions. A rich selection produced a number of fixed points that will be synthetically referred to. We shall expose the case of Porto Marghera, the Venice industrial district: readings and studies developed within our university research unit and with the help of research-fellows, degree students, phd students.
Spatial narratives of the industrial past
Abstract Most of the space in a city is defined by its urban development through history. Gothenburg - as the second largest city in Sweden - has imposing remnants of its industrial past that until now defined the city’s identity. Therefore, some objects are recognised as monuments of cultural heritage. The crane at the old Shipyard Eriksberg is listed as a cultural monument, with the purpose of defining the city’s industrial past. It is now a monument and as such it is venerated for its enduring historic significance in association with city’s shipbuilding and maritime history. Large and visible in the urban landscape the shipyard Eriksberg’s gantry crane became a part of the collective memory. Thus the monument creates an important spatial imprint in the mental picture of the city. It is commemorating a part of its civic past, has monumental proportions and represents a highly potent epoch of industrial activity in Gothenburg’s history. Another monument of the industrial era is the Volvo factory and office; once largest in Europe. But Volvo is not altogether Swedish anymore and the production is not really that large at the home plant. Tracks of the industrial past are evident in specific buildings or left over machinery. The city is simply no longer the same industrial city as it was in the twentieth century. Also, the generations that were involved in the city’s industrial past are disappearing. The Cultural Heritage unit in the city is providing methods to secure the continuity of the narratives through listing and preserving the city’s built heritage. The belief is that saving cultural heritage makes way to secure a long-lasting identity of a place. The basic aim of preservation of physical structures is after all to preserve a credible narrative of the social past. But is it applicable to the mega structures of the twentieth century? Keywords: Cultural heritage, Twentieth-century building, Modern monuments, urban planning, city in evolution, identity, Gothenburg, Sweden, etc.