The presented tactics offer multiple points of access to a complex hybrid problem and can, by their uncertain nature, be more resilient to changes occurring during volatile stages of design processes. Video documentation of the design thinking process allows the exploration of the spaces between abstract thought and the final representation of a design solution.
‘Live-action’ drawings of design strategies enabled communication in transdisciplinary environments and illustrated modes of preservation that expanded beyond scholarly discourse and architectural products. The drawings open up the potential of the spaces beyond financial commodification, where "there are no obvious spectacles around which to organise a tour, or which fit into expectations about what will be gazed upon, and sights will often be indecipherable." (Edensor, 2010)
This research aimed to search for a modality to create a link between practices and objects that are intrinsically and perpetually in flux, and which are subject to multitudes of dynamic physical and epistemic processes. Located at the intersection between scholarly work on post-communist cultural research and industrial ruins as an entry point (Pușcă, 2010, p.2) to this field of study, and spatial and aestheticisation practices that dominate architectural interventions in these spaces, this study explored the role of design-driven modes of action that could create systemic frameworks for their protection through reactivation.
One of the central claims of this work was that while design-driven actions are necessary in order to occupy and extract industrial wastelands from predatory real estate practices, as well as to protect and value the memories embodied in them, the taxonomic presentation of architectural interventions necessitates an intermediary step consisting of design-driven and visual methods.
Along with the methodological shift mentioned previously, reframing the concept of architectural transformation of derelict structures within a paradigm that positions the objects at the centre of socio-political issues and views them as bodies in transition, be it decay or rebirth, emerges as a viable strategy. This perspective shift is counterposed to ‘ruin lust’ or ‘decay porn’, which threaten to turn practices that address industrial heritage into little but the fetishisation of relics. Put succinctly, the ethical approach to patrimony and reuse can be better addressed if the structures' cultural value is being humanised.
A methodological bridge emerged as a result of exploring design and medial practices that could maintain a high degree of fuzziness (Böhm et al., 2021) and that “dwell in the plasticity and multiplicity of an idea” (Pallasmaa, 2011), while creating a systemic framework that fosters creativity and illustrates the potential for spatial and architectural solutions.
BODIES AND DIRTY DRAWINGS
As Jennifer Bloomer postulates, architectural processes are ‘dirty’ (Rendell, 2018), more akin to childbirth than the clean production of a physical object. Ruins are subject to entropy, deterioration and finitude; these spaces and objects are more human bodies than machines (Bouchard, 202, p.99).
"You can say that a building does not sicken and die like a man. I say to you that a building does just that” (Filarete, 1965, p.12; Cairns & Jacobs, 2017, p.26). Their dying is, however, a long and chaotic process, wherein the dilapidated site, the ruin, or the unused building, respectively, are never in stasis but perpetually in flux.
Within this context, a new architecture must engage with this process and the dying body so as to avoid simply operating on cadavers by surgical additions and reassemblages and creating architectural Frankenstein's monsters (Wong, 2016, p.32). Therefore, an architecture of flexibility and iteration, adaptability and dispensability may be critical at a time of climate and societal breakdown.
Applying these insights to designing within ruin-bodies leads to the emergence of parallels to the field of thanatology, as adaptive reuse design situates itself between the aforementioned building natalism and the veneration of already dead objects.
An autoethnographic narration while walking through the ruin
During the initial exploration of the site, I was urged not to leave the car or, at any rate, not to venture unaccompanied into the dilapidated north side of the area.
This concern was not due to the potential presence of dangerous people but because roughly thirty dogs were actively living on the premises, roaming the spaces freely, except for some parts of the production space, and who were, as is customary in Romania, regularly deployed to construction sites as guard dogs.
My father, a now-retired civil engineer who had worked on the Sc Constructii Sa sites since the early 1990s, was well acquainted with canine security details and thus conveniently carried sacks of dried dog food in the trunk of his car. He was my chaperone during the first visit. The dogs were moderately well-kept, all vaccinated and neutered, or so I was assured, and inhabited a series of sheds that flanked the north side of the site.
Nevertheless, their excited yelps as they heard the car approach echoed menacingly through what appeared more like a gothic marshland on a December afternoon or a still from a Tarkovsky film than a potential-filled urban park.
The presence of the dogs, who would in time become my familiars despite my continued fear and respect for them, represented a much-poeticised aspect of industrial wastelands: a resilient, unyielding nature reclaiming, seeking refuge, and giving meaning to spaces humans had long deserted. The dogs belonged to what Tim Edensor named a ‘wild zone’, a “contingent site of occupation and colonisation which avoids the objective processes of ordered territorialisation” (Edensor, 2005, p.60), and which served as a neo-refugia to a plethora of non-human agents whose interactions with the terrain influenced my own.
Paradoxically, the dogs’ presence would later inhabit an almost opposite role during my site visits as they became protectors and guides within uncanny spaces, where human public surveillance was replaced by their senses, alerting me if someone else was nearby. These ruminations on fear would become a recurring theme during other site trips.
These non-human companions within the post-communist ruin were active participants in the transformation that an architect would strive to control; “they were co-participants in the making of this world” (Edensor, 2005, p.319), but their presence, which I chose to acknowledge during the design process, was indicative of a hybridisation of functions that had the potential to lift assigned boundaries between void spaces, nature and objects.
Approaching the excess of non-determined space between buildings that were still in use and ruins without exerting a type of regulatory control that would eliminate the potential of the ‘terrain vague’ of the industrial wasteland meant that the exploration of the area would have to maintain its qualities: a disorder that fosters emancipation, that could stimulate imaginative, alternative practices, and that would, in turn, lend themselves to the envisioning of how other spaces might be differently ordered in accordance with “looser aesthetics, less managed spaces, bodies and things” (Edensor, 2005, p.95).
Managing and curating such a space could not be reduced to adding new architectural bodies that frame, occupy, and afford, and instead required the careful reinterpretation of what the zone already offered.