Approaching Industrial Ruins in a Post-communist Landscape

Tackling the research topic (the handling of industrial ruins in a post-communist landscape) through a design-directed approach has enriched the research process by adding another essential layer to the process of generating knowledge: a speculative creative moment, in which intuition and reason interweave, and the subsequent interrogation of outcomes through a more structured lens.

The surveying documentation, as well as the design-oriented solutions to the sites and the objects they contain is based primarily on hand drawings (such as to emphasize the speculative, intuitive element of their cultural perception), as well as photography and film, interwoven with a written narrative of the process as a whole.

This practice allowed the uncovering of underlying complex entanglements of issues by employing “tacit knowing”, which is intrinsic to architectural design. The basis for this is a “research method collage”2, anchored primarily in the comparative interrogation of the conflicts that arise between design versus built realities, tied into an overarching written narrative of personal and shared memory and perception of the post-communist cultural landscape.

Three design Case Studies now evolve and inform each other simultaneously, in an interplay of design timeframes: Case Study 1 representing a type of “paleoteric knowledge”3, by which a finalized design project (which employed traditional attitude towards design) can be interrogated retrospectively, versus the “neoteric knowledge” introduced by the other two Case Studies, which are forward-looking, working with designing4, and intrinsically playful and speculative.

The research is proving to be an ongoing conversation between the designer and the objects designed, focussing on this recursive process rather than on a finished architectural product.