There is always something haunting about an old decrepit building. Imagine yourself driving through the countryside, going down a winding road, enjoying the scenery. After that last hairpin turn, you are racing up that hill, and you slowly start to see stacks, old smoke stacks. Around this beautiful landscape is an old coal factory. It’s been there for years and has also been abandoned by years. What to do? Have a couple of landscape architects dream something up and use projects that are already in use that actually work.
Okay, part of that introduction isn’t so true. The coal factory is real, the dream of Red Maple Architects is true, but the setting is false. The city in which this factory lies in is the municipality of Chongqing, population 30 million; urbanized area has around 7 million residents. It is one of the most important central cities in China.
What does one do with an old building? Destroy and rebuild, maybe, not Jack Shu from Red Maple Architects. He believes in using the building, its surroundings as a backdrop, and making it into a public space. With the help from friend and old work colleague, Sander Freedman from Sander Design (www.sanderdesign.ca), based in Toronto, travelled to Chongqing and helped with the developmental stages for one month. They plan on using the model of the Distillery District in Toronto.
If you do not know the Distillery District in Toronto, you really are missing out. There are public courtyards where art installations are present, cafés and restaurant that will allow you to have dinner and drinks in the open air, media studios that are producing up and coming applications for our smart books and telephones, bakeries, breweries…… I can go on if need be, but I won’t bore with that.
There are many projects around the world that have taken old buildings or structures and turned them into commercial and residential developments with the intent providing public spaces or just converted them into parks. If we look at the old steel yard and mill in Luxembourg that AllesWirdGut Architects worked on, we see that they have kept the existing stacks and other important elements that made the mill. They produced a modern contemporary park, which also allows commercial enterprises to flourish with the help of crowds who are there to enjoy the urbanized park.
Taking a look at the Ford Assembly Building that was originally designed by Albert Kahn in the 1930s in Richmond, California, we notice that many of the elements that we used during that time to assemble the Fords are still in use as architectural elements. The updated version of the plant was designed Marcy Wong Donn Logan Architects in 2009. A couple key features of the plant were kept in the restaurant, most noticeably the red-lit stack of the Boilerhouse Restaurant, and also the furnace that is in the middle of the restaurant.
The public space is often used by artists, such as Cirque de Soleil and numerous professional orchestras.
The coal factory is Chongqing needs a revitalized look and feel to it, something people will appreciate and use on a daily basis. The area will be cleaned up, and the use of plant material will help bring nature back to the area. The project will serve as a commercial area while celebrating the history of the factory and the people who worked there tirelessly. Public spaces and parks will be integrated into the project for people to roam around and enjoy.
Eventually, residential complexes will be erected, and a small community will be born.
Let’s hope this project does come to fruition, for the sake of the people and for the factory that no longer has a home.
