Terrains Vagues
What qualities attract us to post-industrial sites, and — as architects — how can we intervene in a manner that preserves and enhances their unique character?
Architect Ignasi de Sola-Morales coined the term terrains vagues for those undefined empty spaces that tell of former times and uses. In French, ‘vague’ has etymological roots in wave, fluctuation, or instability. ‘Vague’ also simultaneously connotes vacant, empty, or unoccupied.
What particular qualities attract us to these sites?
It is generally true that older buildings spark our imaginations, while buildings of our own time arouse our curiosity but hardly give us any sense of meaning. With post-industrial relics we are able to feel connected to our recent histories, to human ambition at a grand and powerful scale; we can hear the turbines turning and feel the floor shaking with the raw power of the machinery in action. We are almost fearful of such ambition, such infrastructures of power, of the systems of control necessary to put such plans into action – and of the inherent fragility of even such grand and powerful systems that leave behind decaying and forgotten husks.
This feeling of disconnection (both physical and temporal) is fundamental to our attraction to such sites. Our bodies are at such great odds with the scale of the environment. We are tiny, humbled - we almost feel lost in a desert or set adrift at sea. We become explicitly conscious of our bodies in relation to our environment, and of the fragility of that body.
As opposed to the obvious temporal remove of archaeological ruins, these post-industrial sites speak to a very recent past, containing memories of ultimately flawed dreams. Scholar Dylan Trigg suggests that these types of ruins hold a sort of melancholic fascination to us since they are expressions of Freud’s concept of the uncanny. The power of the uncanny is that it should remain obscured, but keeps working its way to the surface. These spaces of dereliction challenge the notion that we are ever able to securely plan a space of inhabitation. They question the safety and complacency of the contemporary, and challenge the presence of the new with the absence of the past.
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With the functions that once defined them removed, these places appear as relics of the past in the present. They challenge our linear understanding of time and progress. These derelict landscapes resonate with messages of failure and fragility. Artist Robert Smithson often engaged with these topics in his work:
Smithson [..] argued that human intervention on the earth is as much a part of natural processes as an earthquake. Smithson felt that it was inappropriate to disguise the post-industrial nature of a site and advocated that technology and human use is acknowledged. (Kirkwood, 127)
Industrial relics also evoke an aesthetic of disorder, surprise, and threat. We are disconnected from the predictable — these are dangerous places, unplanned, unsupervised, open to the elements. Opened roofs drip, rusting machinery clanks, rusted metal protrudes, and doors creak in the wind. Animals rustle unseen in the shadows, pigeons coo above. The outside bustle of civilization is muffled and suppressed, as though the dust hanging in the air muffles the connection to contemporary reality. As Walter Benjamin and Susan Buck-Morss discussed, we are almost shocked by the removal of the constant, numbing series of sensorial shocks which is “the very essence of modern experience”. Silence is made paramount and obvious.
A work is made in the urging sounds of industry, and, when the dust settles, the pyramid, echoing Silence, gives the sun its shadow. (Kahn, 48)
The natural landscape cannot manifest solitude in the same way as an abandoned building. The natural does not require man to justify itself, but a building represents its builder and announces his absence. As Juhanni Pallasmaa notes:
The silence of architecture is a responsive, remembering silence. A powerful architectural experience silences all external noise; it focuses our attention on our very existence, and as with all art, it makes us aware of our fundamental solitude. (Pallasmaa, 52)
The qualities of emptiness are inherent in small cracks, in excised moments from denser fabrics; the holes in the city. Attempting to design in such places, we must be aware of the fragility of such a condition of emptiness. One of the most essential acts would be to do ‘almost nothing’. Mies van der Rohe expressed that this was the guiding objective behind much of his work. He attempted to impose a sense of order, without destroying the fundamental delicacy of the spatial experience.
There also exist layers of time in these wastelands which reach forward into the future. These voids are indeterminate spaces that allow for innovative temporary uses, absorbing nomadic experiments. Forgotten, ignored spaces are the opposite of the hyper-planned and constantly surveyed contemporary public spaces. Progress and innovation happens on the fringes.
In the fault lines of the Modernist city, fresh and rebellious ideas and designs are emerging as an “architecture of resistance.” (Pak, 176)
These derelict landscapes can become laboratories or incubators for contemporary experiments (including urban agriculture, art installations, co-operative living, etc) – attracting not only the fringes of society but also those adventurous pioneers looking to question the standard strategies of living. The squats and collectives that flourished in post-wall Berlin are testament to the generative capabilities of this type of opportunistic appropriation.
