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Industrial Revolution
The juxtaposition often veers into a theatre of the absurd. At the German Mining Museum in Bochum, which can be booked for weddings, young couples in fancy dress are photographed in front of a giant shaft of rusted steel. The gift shop sells the rough factory-issue soap and ticking-stripe cotton miners’ nightshirts as souvenirs for design types to take home. Half a million visitors each year take in the former coking plant at the Zollverein industrial complex, where the redesigned boiler house by Norman Foster, an elegantly minimal structure of brick and glass, now houses the Red Dot Design Museum – the largest of its kind in the world. They have admired Rem Koolhaas’ exquisitely funky renovation of the coal washery. The artist Thomas Rother, who lives on site in a studio stuffed with industrial artifacts, makes his art by rubbing discarded metal parts on canvas. It’s all so cool, the film studio Glückauf has its new home next to Shaft XII. PACT Zollverein, the centre for modern dance on the compound, is where the miners used to take their showers after a long day’s work. For the former miners, who take visitors on guided tours, it must be head spinning that anybody would travel thousands of kilometres to admire the patina on a place where they once eked out a living with back-breaking and dangerous toil. In the early 20th century, when the Zollverein mine in Essen was the largest, most bustling and most modern colliery in Europe, it would have been hard to imagine that it would one day be a UNESCO World Heritage site visited by design-minded tourists. Culturally and historically, the Ruhrgebiet or Rustbelt, as it came to be known – with its brilliantly oxidizing monuments to man’s intense pursuit of coal and iron ore and their refinement into fuel and steel – is one of the cradles of the Industrial Revolution. And with its relics of the German steel dynasties – the former blast furnaces and coke ovens of the Thyssens and Krupps – it is also, significantly, the scarred machine behind the German war effort. |
