Crafting the Landscape in an Active Steel Plant

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Short description

This project reimagined a mixed-use landscape in an industrial context, which was located in one of the largest active steel plants in China. By taking on the idea of recrafting materials and space on the site, it envisions an alternative reality that bridges the ongoing industry and an aware public.

With the increasing awareness of sustainability and rapidly developed urbanization, traditional heavy industries are gradually being eliminated. However, because of the mass construction of ongoing infrastructure in China, steel production is still not yet to leave the stage. Situated in such a dilemma, this project explores a new landscape paradigm that is not post-industrial yet, but rather on the edge of a post-industrial era. It discusses the possibility of documenting, showcasing and making engaging this dynamic social and economic change.

On reasonable speculation, the steel production technology upgrade in the future would provide the factory with greater potential to reshape its position, whether economic, spatial or cognitive. By recognizing different procedures and correspondingly required space, this project takes a phasing strategy and identifies various types of space to provoke the initial move.

The surgical intervention inserted into the working factory is showcased by various pilot projects after a careful study of the dynamic texture in the steel plant. Pilot projects range from sustainable biomass fields, the public center transformed from abandoned structures, the innovative warehouse-plaza with educational purposes and other potential spots on site.

The landscape intervention also embraces the idea of creative crafting in an industrial context - it sculpts both the spatial quality of physical materials as well as a cognitive relationship between active steel production and a broader community. Of course, craft - the term is usually applied to labor that requires particular skills and makes small production, whereas steelmaking usually involves machine work that makes mass production. These two words, seemingly totally contradictory to each other, however are conceived as a whole and integrated in this project. By gleaning and composing the materials which are disposed of in steel production, this project is intended to expose their meaning not only in the final product - steel, but also in its own existence of multiple materials during the process. Transcending the mere pursuit of efficiency and profits, the craftsmanship underlying this project introduces a way to live creatively amid a rapidly-changing era, rather than turn our face straight away from the declining industry.

By understanding the iterative process of the steelmaking industry and gleaning the materials long neglected, the project mingles what is physically meant to be steelmaking with what cognitively steelmaking could mean to the general public. The landscape acts as a facilitator to bring about public supervision, engagement as well as imagination to the industrial reality in a proactive way.