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Short abstract:

The emergence of artistic and design-driven methodologies allows for tackling issues of industrial heritage at the intersection of spatial and cultural practices. Method assemblages of video vignettes and hand drawings promise to mend lacunas in the discourse on transformation and reuse.

Long abstract:

Design-driven research into the potential for maintenance and transformation of post-socialist industrial architecture in Romania has uncovered that the central problem that needed to be addressed lay not within spatial issues but constituted a cultural crisis:

As cultural amnesia became enforced by post-communist Romanian institutional culture (Wicke, 2018, p. 126), valuable industrial heritage sites were threatened with erasure, along with an essential part of Romanian collective memory. It became evident that architectural research into the topic required developing novel methodological toolsets that allowed explorations rooted in design and could tackle hybrid cultural issues.

The missing method lay in an artistic design-oriented approach that would mediate between representation and architectural intervention strategy, and that could embody a “shift of the gaze” (Ranciere, 2005, p. 13-25) onto industrial heritage sites, by showing modes of reflection and possibilities for further action.

The process evolved into an assemblage of methods and uncovered a new methodology: phenomenographic (Troiani, 2020, p. 247) video vignettes of multiple case study sites that illustrated analysis and exploration practices, design proposals, and narrative context through the overlap of video, hand drawings, and annotated sketches. This experimental artistic process, relying on the making explicit of auto-ethnographic tacit knowledge, has uncovered how “spatial and representational expertise from architecture could be applied in other disciplines” (Von Ballestrem, 2023, p. 111).

This contribution to the “Making and Doing Transformations” aims to showcase and explore how artistic design-driven research can mend lacunas in architectural discourse and offer solutions for rescuing fragile urban heritage sites.