Protection through transformation

While intra-urban industrial ruins have been a focal point of architectural research and planning in Central and Western Europe over the past decades, Romania’s institutional culture has not yet aligned with contemporary discourse. “Until recently, heritage designation was mainly granted to sites pertaining to faith, the Romanian nation, and historic and prehistoric pasts. Industrial and mining heritage registered at the Ministry of Culture listed nothing production or labour-related” (Wicke, Christian et al., 2018, p. 126). This failure to launch and act calls for a novel method of approaching local industrial heritage.

 The initial aim of the research was to counteract the widely occurring process of post-communist cultural amnesia and to reframe Romania’s particular relationship with its dilapidated industrial sites. The goal was to develop modes of action for the protection of intra-urban wastelands which could enable the local population’s engagement with their heritage so that these spaces, if maintained and occupied, could be extricated from predatory real estate development schemes. The post-communist industrial ruin was viewed through the lens of heterotopia (Foucault, 1970, p.10) in order to foster an understanding of the complex social, political and spatial entanglements it embodies and to facilitate a multi-layered methodological approach toward its potential for reanimation. So far, the established methods that have been employed on Romanian derelict industrial sites have oscillated between invasive building practices or fetishisation masked as documentation through film or photography. 

From this, museumisation (Pușcă, 2010, p.10) was identified as a pivotal strategy, yet the practice is time stagnant and can be overridden by financial imperatives. The missing link lay in a design-oriented approach able to mediate between representation and architectural intervention, which would catalyse a “shift of the gaze” (Ranciere, 2005, p. 13-25) by showing modes of reflection as well as possibilities for further action. Following these observations, the non-linear and process-oriented methods, as well as the emergent methodology proposed by this research, aim to facilitate the transfer of tacit knowledge by allowing the viewer, reader, as well as the immersed author to experience the “dirty concepts” (Frichot, 2019, p. 34) of representation, analysis, and design process, rather than compelling them to observe a final product which might obscure relevant insights discarded along the way and be impervious to change. 

Self-authored design case studies, all located in the Transylvania region of Romania, constitute the base of the doctorate: one executed project could be observed as it functioned in real-time, while the other projects served as speculative design sites and were used as experimental playgrounds for various design tools, as well as allegoric canvases for the representation of the disruption of traditional narratives and approaches to industrial wastelands. This research situates itself between auto-ethnographic study, atmospheric representation, and tactical design and operates in the voids that weave ruins and salvageable buildings into a non-binomial system of transitional objects (Pilia, 2019, p.71). Ultimately, the doctorate results illustrate a new methodology for engaging with neglected industrial heritage and present design strategies for approaching and transforming endangered cultural sites.

The publication of my doctoral thesis is available for ➕everyone➕ under this link:

DepositOnce TU Berlin

The dissertation was part of the Programm Entwurfsbasierte Promotion at the TU Berlin, and presents a design-driven approach to architectural research. The case studies I used as a base for the doctorate are self-authored, and the emerging methodology is based on an assemblage of mixed methods.

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On another note…

I‘ve been asked why I chose to not publish with a bona fide publisher and have it out in book stores for people to buy… and that’s the answer right there.

Scientific work has to be open and available to everyone, even if they don’t have the money, a library card, the time, the academic affiliation. I‘ve been bled dry buying articles I needed one paragraph from during this research,and I had all the keys to access knowledge through my .edu address, library access etc..

I don’t oppose publishing in general (obviously) but in this one instance, I wanted the work to be as accessible and immediately open to use as possible… for the three other scholars who will skim through it ;)

Publishing is also exorbitantly expensive (around 10k for this work for instance), assuring open access of a publication adds even more costs (close to 4k according to colleagues who went this route), and by all accounts, it is a grueling process. I wanted to be DONE with it, move on and expand on the work.

I also have a big rant brewing on how this ties into architecture's fixation on egos and authorship, and its absolute lack of class consciousness, but I‘ll save that for later.

So here we are.

I will be printing the book to bring along to conferences and offer as a gift to friends and fellow industrial heritage aficionados, so a few copies will be out there in physical form too.

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Anyway, it was fun. Hope it helps somebody out there. And should you want to rant about methodology and the issue of transferability in design-driven and artistic research, let me know - I have ALL the tea! 🖤 ☕️ 🫖