INTRODUCTION

There is a need to determine what should be to preserved in the industrial landscape. What is it about such spaces that makes them interesting or unique places? How can their character be retained?

This thesis is about industrial landscapes which have outlived their original uses, but represent cultural landmarks of their past history and structural resources that can be reused in the present and future. These places differ in all respects, except that they are remnants or ruins of a common past. In years past, there was a feeling that such places no longer served a useful purpose and should be removed. They were regarded as nuisances and blemishes on the landscape. In the last twenty years some of these sites have been rediscovered as pieces of the past worthy of preservation. The costs of rehabilitation have outweighed the price of demolition. Historical preservation agencies have prevented the loss of many sites brought about by public outcries over their removal. Because of these new attitudes toward this industrial heritage a number of projects have been developed involving conversion to housing, shopping centers, off ices, parks and even museums. Many different levels of preservation have been used from complete restoration of buildings down to the preservation of structural shells and the incorporation of new buildings into the old. In most of these projects, the sites or landscapes that existed around these buildings were obliterated and modernized or they were deleted completely for use as parking lots. It is this latter issue that began to interest me. What is the importance of the landscape, be it a green space or not, to the recognition of a place as it was in the past and how it developed? After thorough research it seemed to me that this aspect of these projects had been neglected and the potential of the existing exterior spaces of these places as readymade landscapes, in their own right, has not been recognized as a project of the history and evolution of the place.

Industrial landscapes are often overlooked because they are not understood as being a landscape. Pierce F. Lewis in his article, "Axioms for Reading the Landscape", claims that it rarely occurs to most Americans to think of landscape as including everything from city skylines to farm silos.1 He believes that, " All human landscape has cultural meaning, no matter how ordinary it may be.... Our human landscape is our unwitting autobiography, reflecting our tastes, our values, and even our fears, in tangible, visible form," and that, " the things great and small that man has made, provide strong evidence of the kind of people we are, were, and will be.2 Industrial landscapes are a common place, but they have many intricacies and spacial qualities which are obscured because of what Robert L. Thayer Jr. calls human emotion. He believes that there is an attitude that if landscapes ore environmental messes they are worthless. His article "Visual Ecology. comments on the emotive or affective response most people have towards landscape. He feels that people only feel comfortable with manicured lawns and a scattering of trees in rows or clumps.3 He then goes on to point out the importance of opening up new perspectives, such as using industrial landscapes as settings for developing an environmenta1 ethic. Using Gasworks Park in Seattle, Washington as his example, Thayer says that the retention of the existing remains of the gasworks has created an ethic that can be said to represent the visua1 acceptance of mans technology in the park landscape; it reassures us that all man-made development is not "unnatural," and it encourages us to consider similiar attempts to recycle valuable resources. Rather than serving as an "escape into the pastoral, the park presents a "stay here and resolve problems image.4 This is the point I hope to prove in this work.

To begin one has to understand the nature of the industrial landscape means. A number of landscape theoreticians have written about the industrial landscape and related issues, including John Stilgoe, Pierce F. Lewis, J. B. Jackson, David Lowenthal, David Meinig, and Thomas Bender.

What does the word landscape means? It is a word on which there is little agreement about its meaning, according to J. B. Jackson and John Stilgoe. The most common dictionary definition is "a portion of land which the eye can comprehend at a glance."5 This comes from Dutch scenic painting of the Sixteenth Century called 'landscap', which when brought to England in about 1630 became "landscape,. meaning large scale paintings of rural vistas with towns.6 There is also a derivation from the German word 'landschaft,' which almost certainly preceeded 'land-scap'. Landschaft means a collection of dwellings and other structures crowded together within a circle of pasture, meadows, or fields.7 The important issue here is whether landscape means a natural setting with human elements or one without. Stilgoe thinks it means land that has been manipulated by man out of a wilderness. Wilderness is the pristine land that remains. He states that a landscape happens not by chance but by contrivance, by premeditation, by design. A forest, swamp, or prairie no more constitute a landscape than does a chain of mountains. Such land forms are only wilderness, the chaos from which landscapes are created by men intent on ordering and shaping space for their own ends. But landscapes always display a fragile equilibrum between natural and human force; terrain and vegetation are moulded, not dominated.8 In his book Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, J.B. Jackson states that Americans tend to think of landscape as natural scenery, e.g. wilderness, and that for Europeans it always has contained a human element.9 He sees the landscape as a composition of man-made spaces on the land; sympathetic spaces that serve a community. These ore portions of the Earth's surface that can be comprehended at a glance, they may be complex but they have certain common elements that make them readable. He then continues to say that no group of people set out to create a landscape, but they set out to create a community. The landscape which is the visible manifestation of this is simply the by-product of the people working and living there, i.e. the political landscape.10 D.W. Meinig extends the thought to say, landscape is all around us. It is related to, but not identical with environment. Environment is an inherent property of every living thing, it is that which surrounds and sustains; we are always environed, always enveloped by an outer world. Landscape is less inclusive, not so directly part of our organic being. Landscape is defined by our vision and interpreted by our minds.11 We must have an open mind about the value of all landscapes whether we appreciate them or not, and whether or not they formulate into our personnal definition. As Pierce Lewis claims, nearly all items in the landscape reflect culture in some way, and these items are no more or less important than each other,12 but that most objects in the landscape, although they convey all kinds of messages, do not convey those messages in any obvious way.13 The landscape does not speak to us very clearly, so we must learn how to read it and ask questions appropriate to it.

One can see all the complexities that arise over the common landscape, much less the industrial one. I think we are moving to break out of these attitudes, but this is clear, as this quotation from John Stilgoe suggests, "The landscape value system, and particularly the aethetic it produces, unfairly condemns whole areas of industrial cityscape, of non-landscape. And as long as the vestiges of landscape endure, partisans of cityscape and great industry must fight a lonely battle, one contrary to the common wisdom of Americans descended from the makers of landscape.14

1 Meinig, D.lnternertation of the Ordinary Landscape , p 11

2 Ibid, p l2

3 Thayer, "Visual Ecology" p 37

4 Ibid, p 43

5 Jackson, Discoverinq the Vernacular Landscape, p 3

6 Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, p 11

7 Ibid, p 12

8 Ibid, p3

9 Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, p 7

10 Ibid, p l2

11 Meinig, Interpretation of the Vernacular, p 3

12 Ibid, p l8

13 Ibid, p 26

14 Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, p 346