Wojciech Wilczyk

Postindustrial ruins

Unused for several decades, industrial buildings are quite an impressive sight. And this must not necessarily be an experience of the traumatic kind. Industrial architecture (or its quickly disappearing remnants) is an example of the successful combination of esthetics with functionality. This is probably why the ruins of factories, emptied of any industrial installations, fascinate and attract our attention. It is nevertheless a common opinion that industrialism is devoid of esthetic value. Mediocre antique ruins, built of prefabricate, located in one of the Greek colonies or in a province of the Roman Empire, attract pilgrimages of tourists with guidebooks in their hands. Meanwhile factory buildings built in the early modernism period, often designed by famous architects, are undergoing gradual degradation. The rapid economic growth of the People’s Republic of China (that neo-liberal dream come true, where the absence of workers’ rights and labor unions leads to “low production costs”), which increased the demand on steel products, also led to an increase in the price of scrap metal. Ruins located in the heart of post-industrial towns, where the closing down of local businesses led to a large unemployment rate, became a reservoir of metal elements which can be sold in one of the numerous scrap collection points. On old factory, cement plant, steelworks and coking plant grounds you can almost always encounter people risking their lives to tear the floors and concrete constructions in search of scrap metal.