 | |
 |
 |
Industrial RevolutionOld factories and abandoned smelters are now manufacturing memories.
As the late French actress Simone Signoret wittily titled her memoirs, “nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.” Nowhere is this more true than in Germany’s Ruhr Valley, where the abandoned mine shafts and slag heaps in the heart of what was once the country’s industrial engine now draw tourists keen to explore what might possibly be the least likely spot for a dream vacation: the Industrial Heritage Route. What do you do with the carcass of an industrial network and way of life now left behind? Why, you turn it into a design object. Showing remarkable foresight, the local preservation authorities spent $220-million bringing in design gurus such as Norman Foster and Rem Koolhaas on a vast re-imagination project. Their inspiration for the 400-kilometre industrial network through the Ruhr Valley, encompassing 4,400 square kilometres of Europe’s most densely populated conurbation, was to reconceive the shuttered smelters as, essentially, museums of work. |
