On this nine days trip around the Arctic Norway and Russia there were a lot of strong feelings that emanated through my mind and body. We went to many different places with different qualities. We met various people that live in these spaces, and they all have widely differing backgrounds and beliefs about this landscape and how to inhabit these spaces.
What struck me on this trip was how far the city-planning have gone from planning for the people that inhabit these places and how it focuses more and more on planning around big industry and economical growth. I felt like the industry had taken over a big part of this region, and even the people living there could often just see future in these big industries.
We were so lucky to meet with wonderful people in Vardø, Hamningber, Kirkenes and Murmansk that I felt were doing some extraordinary work with the sense of engagement within a multiplicity. Doreen Massey talks about it in the book For Space: “If time unfolds as change then space unfolds as interaction. In that sence space is the social dimension. Not in the sense of exclusivety human sociability, but in the sence of engagement within a multiplicity.”
I asked myself many times on this trip where the western part of the world had taken the wrong turn and if there is no turning back from this obsession on industry and mass-production?
Is that the only way to move forward?
Does these industries and their architecture embody some kind of beauty?
What happens when they are left behind does the nature take over and wove them into its arms?
At the same time these places made me feel sad, I felt the raw industrial environment was stimulating in some odd way. Juhani Pallasmaa talks about how buildings and cities are instruments and museums of time, how they enable us to see and understand the passing of history, and to participate in time cycles that surpass individual life. Does this industrial architecture connect us with history, where trough buildings we are able to imagine the bustle of the old street? Does time stand firmly still in these structures? What kind of opportunities are there to find in these spaces and how can I work with the enviorment and the local people to make them visible?
1 comment:
I don't think there is a contradiction between planning for industry and planning for people. There are many ways to define industry, for example reindeer herding could be described as an industry. Where would one draw the difference between industry and ecology? Could one say that industry is a conscious ecology, -within such a statement lies some sort of responsibility on what informs industry. I'd say industry is potentially a kind of ideology, and also highly desirable because it is about distributing resources to as many people as possible(Africa is going to undergo an industrial era as part of it's desired future development, -how, not if, is the key question).
I visited the Castelmaure winery a few years back, a wine production facility constructed as a cheap shed. While this plant is truly industrial in how it operates, with machines and efficiency at it's core, -it was constructed with a consciousness of ecological aspects, both in how the mechanics worked, and also what specific architectural qualities the workers were exposed to when working there. Constructing fish-gutting-factories, slaughterhouses, oilplants and mines, rarley happens with the same informed decisions.
I think your note on time is a key part in discussing industry.
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