Protection through transformation: post-communist industrial ruins

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.