A Giant's Quiet Decay: The Latency of Superior North
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Date
2012-05-18T22:08:25Z
Authors
Brown, Heather Kathleen
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Waterloo
Abstract
What happens after a place has been exploited, isolated, and neglected?
What occurs when that place is bound – confined – by impenetrable voids
of dereliction? Its core, slowing diffracting, with no opportunity to perceive
outward – beyond the derelict terrain to the boundless expanses of earth and
water that have perpetuated its vitality.
And what then, if for a moment, this decaying place is given a view beyond
these boundaries?
Deindustrialization has invariably altered modern cultural conceptions of control
over nature. The terrain remaining after decades of resource exploitation is
composed of deep voids and fissures that reside physically, psychologically, and
theoretically in-between the accepted realms of culture and nature. This thesis
explores the perversion and dissolution of these two opposing realms within
the sublime and fantastical derelict landscape of a declining town. Deindustrial
voids are considered as both barrier and bridge; serving as persistent symbolic
reminders of the volatile and hubristic relationship between culture and nature,
and offering potential reconnection to the natural landscape of a city’s foundation.
Reacting to collective nostalgia through memorialisation, totemism, and
erasure, typical design interventions continue to prioritize cultural domination
and emphasize the designer as creator in order to reassert control over the chaos
of deindustrialization, often resulting in placeless infilling of the void. Ideas of
extimacy, alterity, and ruination, with influences from the fields of industrial
archaeology and landscape architecture, ground contemporary reactions to
the deindustrial void and explore the role of landscape in the creation and
fragmentation of ideas of place for the dissolving North American industrial
city.
Both inspired and situated within the declining former town of Fort William,
Ontario, this thesis surveys an abandoned industrial corridor that encircles the
town, severing it from the liminal water’s edge and landscape beyond. Viewed
as a palimpsest, this site is considered beyond its most recent industrial usage
to expose a place-specific natural/cultural terrain comprised of material and
immaterial layers of evolution and exploitation.
This thesis positions the architect as perceiver, hoping to inspire sensitivity,
pause, and reflection and resists ideas of forced transformation as a means of
outwardly expressing progress. It immerses itself within the in-between places
that blur preconceived boundaries – natural and cultural, past and future, controlled
and chaotic – in order to encounter the inherent existential qualities of
a site in transition.
Description
Keywords
Northern Ontario, Fort William, Thunder Bay, deindustrialization, nature, culture, landscape, alterity, liminal, palimpsest, edge, decline, identity