Speculative Study - Fabrica Independența

The research site is located on the northern border of Sibiu’s old city centre, between the outermost belt of the medieval fortress wall and the river Cibin, its silhouette visible amongst the tiled roofs of the old town. The former industrial sector of the “Uzinele Rieger”, a manufacturer of agricultural machinery, founded in 1896 and consisting of 19 buildings on a site of roughly 9 ha, has halted production starting in 1992 and has now lied dormant and neglected for nearly three decades, forming the biggest brownfield site in central Sibiu. 

Privately held by a Romanian investment fund, Independența has long been embroiled in legal difficulties, particularly concerning built heritage matters. Exceptionally, a few of the fabrication halls have been declared “historical monuments”, yet this decision, which arguably contributes some protection from the demolition of all objects on site, has been contested, as the owners and some experts argue that the property's heritage designation is unduly stringent (Pavăl & Găvozdea, 2023, p. 265). 

This former industrial platform was given special consideration in a number of city strategies and the master plan that the Sibiu City Hall commissioned and approved. However, the municipal government's agenda does not prioritise its regeneration (Pavăl & Găvozdea, 2023, p. 265).

Despite preliminary studies conducted by students of Universitatea de Arhitectura si Urbanism “Ion Mincu” (Cosmescu, 2016) and the intriguing and unique character of the site, no further steps have been taken to rehabilitate the former “Rieger” factories. 

It is worth noting that opening the site and utilising it for cultural activities has the potential to stimulate the restructuring of the entire surrounding urban area while also providing an opportunity for local communities to learn about and appreciate their industrial heritage. 

This could lead to their increased involvement in the promotion and cultural reuse of industrial sites, aligning with the strategies outlined in the “Strategia Patrimoniului Cultural Naţional” issued by the Romanian Ministry of Culture (Merciu, 2014, p. 12).

The approach to design-oriented handling of the issue of “Independența” started with an initial intuitive experience of the site. The aim was to appropriate and distort classical empirical methods of architectural and urban analysis. Leaning on a theory of “ludic thinking” and “playful design” (Prominski & Seggern, 2019, p.105), and to interrogate the site beyond the confining norms of standard feasibility studies. 

One first such act was ‘breaking into’ the site. As access into the buildings was limited, the field unknown and precarious, this “urban exploration” unveiled “an indeterminate space; a place outside the circuit of the productive structures of the city, an internal, uninhabited, unproductive and often dangerous island, simultaneously on the margins of the urban system and a fundamental part of the system” (Edensor, 2008, p.126). 

The field appeared not as something to be operated on but as a ‘terrain vague’ and an active participant in the design process that should follow. The “necrotic” topography (Comaroff & Ong, 2013, p.98) of the wasteland imposed its own parameters for how it was to be handled. 

The disruptive landscape of the former Fabrica Independența had to be experienced intuitively, as, for one, almost no planning material was available, which led to the decision to attempt a full immersion in its ecology and to chart this environment world (Frichot, 2016, p.99), and to start from an unknown within. 

The history embodied in the site and its hosts (Wong, 2016, p.103) is not “stored” in the space, readily accessible and fit to be experienced, nor is it entirely encoded poetically in classical architectural phenomenologies, but is instead entangled in a web of overlapping past and present, “life and death, vitality and materiality that both constrain and enable movement (or development, in its simplest understanding)” (Gibson-Graham, 2011, p.15). 

In the heterotopia of time and deviation represented by the industrial ruin site, time had, indeed, collapsed into a flat circle (Graham & Sparrow, 2018, p.17), so considering that the linearity of its perception was set aside in favour of everything happening all at once, a design-driven approach to its reanimation, or protection, or making visible, had to employ methods that would not get discarded during a unidimensional and unidirectional process.

“Ruination does not signal the absolute annihilation of building and organisation but instead opens out to radically different forms of organisation and organising” (DeSilvey, 2017, p.19). 

The approach to the buildings within the Independența area, which for the most part remained impenetrable, was anchored in the same practices employed in order to understand the interstitial spaces of the site: walking and embodied documentation through film and sketches while naming the objects not in an attempt to create taxonomies, but so as to create a strategy for action based on what their characteristics (and character) allowed.

Categorising the structures into hosts, as per Liliane Wong’s proposals in “Adaptive Reuse - Extending the Lives of Buildings” (Wong, 2016, p.164-174), constituted a first step toward this process. 

The initial aim of this practice was to determine which buildings were still viable and practical for functional transformation and reuse, which were non-viable but fit for alternative uses not linked to reprogramming, and which had to be removed, whether because their structural dereliction would pose safety risks or in order to clarify and decongest the site. 

The scope was to decidedly avoid the “wholesale remodelling” of these industrial buildings and erase their cultural and historical connotations, which the Romanian public, as illustrated in Chapter 2.1, is still grappling with. 

Conversion aimed toward high-end, sanitised functions was rejected a priori, not least because the nostalgic attitudes that drive such developments in Western Europe have not taken hold of “provincial” Romania, which in Romanian parlance means “cities that are not the capital, Bucharest”, yet. This nostalgia, argues Sally Stone, ”always contains a sense of a break with the past, a period of neglect or forgetting. A discontinuity has to occur before reconciliation can be made.