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Industrial Revolution
Then again, maybe you’ve got a thing for rust. And it would appear, given the wave of industrial nostalgia that underlies the makeovers of former factories and warehouses in decaying urban centres from lower Manhattan to the outskirts of Milan, many of us do. Today, hedge fund managers meet for lunch at an abandoned distillery on Toronto’s lakefront or gallery-hop at a burned-out power plant in London’s East End, where their predecessors once punched in for a day’s hard work. Along the Industrial Heritage Route, one of several such trails in Europe being established by the ERIH or European Route of Industrial Heritage, visitors ride their bright-orange rental bikes to the Gasometer in Oberhausen, a 120-metre-high former storage facility for gases used in iron and steel production, now the tallest exhibition space in Europe. In 1999, Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, stacked 13,000 coloured oil barrels prettily in its cylindrical interior. At Duisburg-Nord Country Park, where the August Thyssen plants once made pig iron on the canals of the Emscher River, landscape architect Peter Latz transformed kilometres of blast furnaces and, instead of sodding over the slag heaps, built green walkways right through the rust. Call it Memories of Work: It’s a strangely loaded esthetic in which outdated machinery overgrown with green seemingly appears melancholic and wistful. Each of the anchor points along the German Industrial Heritage Route is imbued with nostalgia for the time when we made something with our hands here in the West. So smitten are we with abandonment and decrepitude, we can’t help thinking the former coke ovens and storage silos would make really cool lofts. |
