The Myth of the Breeze

Confrontations with industry (I generally feel like I’m pretty bad at titles)

I have a paper to write. The first of the quar­ter. But first I have to turn in a paper pro­posal. I feel like such a fuck­ing book­worm. Here’s the proposal:

I am inter­ested in the exis­tence, decom­po­si­tion, and recov­ery of now dead or dying indus­trial sites. In a post-industrial world, a his­tory of labor, migra­tion, pro­duc­tion and design exists within these sites. They rep­re­sent, in some sense, a col­lec­tive his­tory to soci­eties more true than the national parks and pris­tine land­scapes we like to claim as such. But aes­thet­i­cally, we despise these places. We seem appalled by the image of the tech­nol­ogy that sup­ports us (eas­ily rep­re­sented in the recent cre­ation of cell phone tow­ers dis­guised as palm and pine trees). Yet there are instances of indus­try being incor­po­rated in pub­lic spaces, or recov­ered into newly func­tion­ing locales.
My paper will address the dif­fer­ing dynam­ics that exist between peo­ple and the old indus­trial land­scapes they may share space with. How can the dead indus­trial land­scape be per­ceived as a kind of his­tor­i­cal mon­u­ment? Is there a risk in val­oriz­ing an envi­ron­men­tally (and in many ways socially) destruc­tive past by memo­ri­al­iz­ing it? The Duis­burg Park in Munich can serve as an exam­ple to address these ques­tions. The park is an exam­ple of an insti­tu­tion­al­ized use of an old man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­ity and an excel­lent instance of an indus­trial site recre­ated as a place for explo­ration and enjoy­ment.

But what of more impromptu rela­tion­ships we estab­lish with our indus­trial past? Locally, I will look to the Sacra­mento Port. The area around the port sup­ports a large num­ber of fish­er­men, and the port recently con­structed a small park at one end that remains mostly unused. What hap­pens to a rural space on the edge of an indus­trial site? How does a space like this that is yet unplanned get used by the pub­lic? Another inter­est­ing exam­ple to look at is the Moth­ball Fleet–a col­lec­tion of old naval ships at the inner­most part of the San Fran­cisco Bay. At a dis­tant vista point are inter­pre­tive signs explain­ing the fleet, but an attempt to get closer to the ships gets you lost in a treach­er­ous busi­ness park. We are kept far away from these beastly ships.

I will address the ways in which old indus­trial sites are ignored by or incor­po­rated into cur­rent design and devel­op­ment. How do we turn our backs on these sites of man­u­fac­tur­ing, and how do we embrace them as a col­lec­tive ele­ment of his­tory and revel in their com­pelling archi­tec­ture and image?

Lit­er­a­ture review to include:

Lynda H. Schneek­loth, “Unruly and Robust: An Aban­doned Indus­trial River.” Loose Space: Pos­si­bil­ity and Diver­sity in Urban Life.

Eliz­a­beth Meyer, “Sit­u­at­ing Mod­ern Land­scape.” The­ory in Land­scape Architecture.

Rob Thayer, Gray World, Green Heart: Tech­nol­ogy, Nature, and the Sus­tain­able Landscape.

Kevin Lynch, Wast­ing Away: An explo­ration of waste, what it is, how it hap­pens, why we fear it, how to do it well.