Cultural and Creative Work in Industrial Heritage Sites. From Disciplinary Spaces to What?

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the proliferation of culture-based regenerations of industrial heritage sites has called for the fields of architecture, urban planning, management, aesthetics and policy-making to come together in an effort to design functional programmes that could accommodate a new cognitive and immaterial type of production in buildings formerly intended to house manual labour and manufacturing. Through the analysis of four case studies, the thesis aims at underlining the form-follows-function injunction that guided the conception and construction of factories from the end of the 19th century to the 1940s, while consequently assessing the problematic nature of their cultural transformation. Furthermore, by comparing the different architectural approaches adopted to confront the challenges of redeveloping such disciplinary spaces, the dynamics and needs of industrial as well as creative workers are redirected to their relationship with the built environment and its distribution and aesthetic qualities.