With the introduction of new communications and transportation systems and the reduction of the past ages’ modes, vast areas of the city have been transforming into a place of deindustrialized zones and unending vistas where space and time become distorted. Sounds of industry pass as the ambiguity of the situation sits still. A world of commerce and production escapes the once heavily industrial areas as the region sits asleep becoming a remembrance of a time long past. Remnants remain as if to speak of what used to be and what is yet to come. However, the ocular biased culture of western civilization resists this milieu for one of new, tidy beginnings. Workers survive to produce and transport goods amongst these lines of unfiltered landscapes filled with cracked asphalt, splitting concrete, and crumbling brick. The industrial remnants that remain sit in the urban context unaware of one other. How do these fragments and landscapes become stitched to a thriving society once again? Why should society critically look at the post-industrial predicament as an advantageous scenario to expound upon in the future? And how does such a place that has been removed from the norm of social acceptance become habitable again? This thesis seeks to explore these questions and possible reactions to the predicament that industry has created within the city.
Using Ignasi de Sola-Morales Rubio’s concept of terrain vague, current ideas in perception will be addressed through creating a more contextual architectural interaction between the existing fragments and new proposed figures within the voidspaces of the city. Acting as a mediator of internal and external forces, the buildings’ architecture of business and art becomes impactful to how the area can be transformed. Resulting from a dialogue between scale, program, and memory, tensions will arise that form the stitches to both the planned and the unanticipated events creating a holistic complex. The exploration will become a haptic approach to design, which deeper meaning can be created through physical and experiential forces used to question the relationship between the person and the place amongst the fragments, the figures, and the voids.
In response to the exploration of perception and the current activity that is occurring within the postindustrial deindustrialized zone, the program that is being developed explores a situation that could bring the still thriving industry and the future technology together. A large-scale manufacturing distillery with a research institute placed within the palimpsest of the Longworth Hall’s rail yard site provides a complex for the existing business to move forward, while the past is noted and heightened, both conceptually and experientially. The process and craft of manufacturing through distilling, the site fragments that exist within the postindustrial landscape, and the flows of people, water, and grain, are the driving forces that will link the history of the site with the humans’ perception of the space and the future economic situation.