Abstract

The visual culture that defined the industrial era Ruhr District has in recent decades given way to a post-steel visual culture that represents a new resolution to the tension between nature and technology through cultivation of what I term landscape value based on an extension of Alois Riegl’s work on monuments (Riegl, 1928). From 1989 to 1999, the International Building Exhibition, Emscher Park (IBA) became a catalyst for discursive and material changes integral to new images and relations in the Ruhr District. During the decade long tenure of IBA Emscher Park, coal mining and steel production brownfields became important sites for understanding how the post-industrial order materialized in the Ruhr District. Astonishingly, decaying industrial structures were rededicated as architectural and technological masterpieces, and ‘weeds’ were designated as natural growth worthy of protection.

• Shannon C. McMullen (US) is currently an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at Purdue University. McMullen teaches in Purdue’s new Electronic and Time-Based Art Program. Her current research interests include intersections of nature, art and technology and culture-led urban regeneration.

Full text (PDF) p.  472-473