NOTICED:INDUSTRIAL NOSTALGIA
As the late French actress Simone Signoret wittily titled her memoirs, “nostalgia isn’t what it used to be”. What we yearn for seems to be more of a variable than a constant.
Nowhere is this more true than in Germany’s Ruhr valley, where the abandoned mine shafts and slag heaps in the heart of what was once Germany’s industrial engine now draw tourists keen to explore what might possibly be the least likely spot for a dream vacation: the Industrial Heritage route.
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 abandoned factories and warehouses in decaying urban centers from lower Manhattan to the outskirts of Milan—many of us do.
Today, the hedge fund and internet start-up money goes gallery hopping and out for lunch at a former distillery on Toronto’s lakefront, or a burned-out power plant in London’s East end, where their predecessors might once have punched in for a day’s hard work. At the Industrial heritage route, (one of several such routes in Europe being established by the ERIH, or European route of Industrial Heritage), visitors ride their bright orange rental bikes down the trail to the Gasometer in Oberhausen, a 120 metre high former storage facility for gases used in iron and steel production, now the largest exhibition space in Europe: in 1999, Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude stacked 13,000 colored oil barrels prettily in its cylindrical interior. At Landscape Park Duisburg Nord, where the August Thyssen plants once made pig iron on the canals of the Emscher river, landscape architect Peter Latz transformed miles of abandoned blast furnaces and slag heaps and instead of mowing all the furnaces down and sodding over the slag heaps, built green walkways right through the rust.
Call it Memories of Work: it’s a strangely loaded aesthetic in which abandoned and outdated machinery overgrown with green appears anthropomorphically melancholic and wistful. Each of the anchor points along the trail are poignant with nostalgia for the time when we made something with our hands here in the West: so smitten are we with abandonment and decrepitude, you can’t help thinking the former coke ovens and storage silos would make really cool lofts. 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 phallic shaft of rusted steel. While the gift shop sells the rough, factory-issue miner’s soap and ticking-stripe cotton and linen miner’s nightshirts as souvenirs for design types to take home.
Close to a million visitors so far have taken in the former coking plant at Zollverein, where one of the vast yet elegantly minimal structures of brick and glass now houses the red dot design museum, the largest of its kind in the world. They have admired the re-designed Boiler House by Norman Foster and Rem Koolhaas’ exquisitely funky renovation of the Coal Washery. The artist Thomas Rother, who lives on the site in a studio stuffed with industrial artifacts, makes his art by rubbing abandoned metal parts on canvas. It’s all so cool, the film studio Gluck-auf 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 miles to admire the patina on a place where they once eked out a living with back breaking and dangerous toil.
Back in the late 19th century, when the Zollverein mine in Essen was the largest, most bustling and 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.
Geographically, the Ruhr is a river that originates in the rolling hills of Westphalia and runs west until meeting up with the mighty Rhine. Its valley encompasses 1,700 square miles of Europe’s most densely populated conurbation (5.6 million inhabitants dotted across a dozen overlapping cities and towns). But 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 abandoned blast furnaces and coke ovens of the Thyssens and Krupps, it is also, significantly, the scarred machine behind the German war effort.
After the war, and the decline of heavy industry in Europe, the abandoned factories of the Ruhr such as Zollverein—once described as ‘the most beautiful mine in the world’- took on the poignant romanticism of a vast ruined Greek folly. It didn’t hurt that the fashion for industrial chic and patina became the dominant aesthetic of our post-industrial times.
Showing remarkable foresight, the local preservation authorities chartered a planning organization called the IBA, which spent 160 million Euros bringing in design gurus such as Foster and Koolhaas on a vast re-imagination project. What do you do with the rotting and shuttered carcass of a vast industrial network and way of life now abandoned? Why you turn it into a design object. The 400 km industrial network becomes a heritage trail around the shuttered smelters and pits, reconceived, essentially, as museums of work.
Do the chicly dressed visitors, in their designer worker’s boots and miner’s denim picking at their arugula salads in the rusted shell of what was once a burning smelter appreciate the irony? Signoret was onto something: it is truly amazing what we can feel nostalgia for. What this odd turn of events–and what, ultimately industrial nostalgia tells us, is that you never know what you’ll miss till it’s gone.