Artistic Vision & Community Form

Reflections on Landscape and Industry

Surmise & Creation:
the Connection between Artistic Vision & Community Form

1. Industrial Ruins & Spiritual Ruins
Examining industrial forms related to community space, we found it useful to seek the views of fine artists, whose surmises necessarily precede the establishment of forms in a community environment.

All communities face changes. Such metamorphoses originate in institutional change, cultural change, and economic change, among other causes affecting their organization, image, and purpose. Ruin may initially result from economic decline or from loss of motivation that may be termed a spiritual decline, but it is a physical manifestation.

In the community particularized by this reflection, the broader region containing it imposed massive capacity increases in surrounding and bisecting transportation corridors, cultures comprising its denizens multiplied with a diversity atypical of most other communities in the nation, and a large manufacturing facility in its limits began a permanent shutdown that would affect its employment base, economic base, and social ecology simultaneously with vacating a major quadrant of its urban space. Such shocks to the system threaten ruin, physical and spiritual, and are often sufficient to generate questions among the remnant.

Within our area of interest, the highest capacity interchange of the Interstate Highway system in the South saw increases of its legs from four lanes to eight and ten lanes, and its ramps topped the heights of five-story buildings; heavy rail mass transit was added; the second busiest airport in the northern part of the state added capacity and continued to grow; the state transportation department resisted municipal requests to address disruptions caused by increases in capacity of a major corridor cleaving downtown, but it became the main street to a remarkable variety of cultures, though the old Main Street languished. Government mass transit ran buses and trains, scarred and healed the land, then tattooed the region with lines and nodes to institutional centers, while Hispanic microbuses offered international mass transit, currency exchange, and immigration lawyers. Oldsmobile died and with it the town’s fathers’ lifestyles. All the while, nearby infrastructure languished in an antiquated semi-rural pattern supportive of bucolic farmettes held by industrial workers soon to be out of jobs due to closing of a local automobile manufacturing plant.

Signs sprouted along a multi-cultural main street, not merely in multiple languages but in a multiplicity of alphabets and ideograms. Bombed ruins in defeated nations may be left as reminders of tragedy and later visited by millions as a landscape of memory, but factories abandoned from disinterest in their products hardly invite romantic or other fascinations. Against such a bleak sky even lightning bugs darken to leave no light for any remnant, but along with such threats of disruption come opportunities for redemption.

2. Cultural Redemption in the Availability of Trash as Treasure
Since Renaissance scholars noticed fragments of fallen Roman glory in their midst, Western culture took a Romantic view of older, ruined structures as reminders of supernal achievement. During the late Twentieth Century and early Twenty-first Century, American fascination for ruins was expressed in revivals of 19th & early 20th century. The habitation of ruins, seemingly unconscious after the fall of Rome, grew to a conscious fascination at various times afterwards. At its zenith, the interest was so intense that it was necessary to build ruins in order to meet the demands of the market place. The availability of ruins undervalued by their owners enabled them to be had at a low cost by those who exposed their worth to others until there were too few of the ancient artifacts for those who wanted them.

The post-industrial economy produced its own debris fields, and some of these in turn generated sufficient interest to invite speculation as to whether such Renaissance masters as Piranesi, had they lived in modern times, might have been known for their reconstruction of old factories as living quarters rather than their gleaning of Imperial detritus.

The current crop of industrial ruins seems destined to the first of many, and the impending availability encourages examination by those who would design, re-build, and inhabit them. Communities seek increased interaction with buildings and sites having continuing uses, though as they change, these forms will be noticed for different qualities that will affect their occupation. While cooling towers may not be converted to exam chambers, the scale of these edifices is so large as to necessitate re-design to accommodate human activity. We examine industrial forms for consideration.

3. Embodiment of Decay
The late Madeleine L’Engle called art an act of incarnation, while John Gardner speculated that it “beat back the monsters”, and J.R.R. Tolkien saw it as a sub-creation that essentially collaborated in the studio of God. By keeping in their foundations and their shells those fragments that survived from earlier eras, the re-uses proposed for facilities that once comprised the heart of industrial America incorporate archeology and architecture that continue to draw the interest of society.