A Giant's Quiet Decay: The Latency of Superior North

Northern Ontario;Fort William;Thunder Bay;deindustrialization;nature;culture;landscape;alterity;liminal;palimpsest;edge;decline;identity;Architecture

Brown, Heather Kathleen

University of Waterloo

关键词: Northern Ontario;    Fort William;    Thunder Bay;    deindustrialization;    nature;    culture;    landscape;    alterity;    liminal;    palimpsest;    edge;    decline;    identity;    Architecture;   

Others  :  https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/10012/6753/1/Brown_Heather.pdf

瑞士|英语

来源: UWSPACE Waterloo Institutional Repository

【 摘 要 】

What happens after a place has been exploited, isolated, and neglected?What occurs when that place is bound – confined – by impenetrable voidsof dereliction? Its core, slowing diffracting, with no opportunity to perceiveoutward – beyond the derelict terrain to the boundless expanses of earth andwater that have perpetuated its vitality.And what then, if for a moment, this decaying place is given a view beyondthese boundaries?Deindustrialization has invariably altered modern cultural conceptions of controlover nature. The terrain remaining after decades of resource exploitation iscomposed of deep voids and fissures that reside physically, psychologically, andtheoretically in-between the accepted realms of culture and nature. This thesisexplores the perversion and dissolution of these two opposing realms withinthe sublime and fantastical derelict landscape of a declining town. Deindustrialvoids are considered as both barrier and bridge; serving as persistent symbolicreminders 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, anderasure, typical design interventions continue to prioritize cultural dominationand emphasize the designer as creator in order to reassert control over the chaosof deindustrialization, often resulting in placeless infilling of the void. Ideas ofextimacy, alterity, and ruination, with influences from the fields of industrialarchaeology and landscape architecture, ground contemporary reactions tothe deindustrial void and explore the role of landscape in the creation andfragmentation of ideas of place for the dissolving North American industrialcity.Both inspired and situated within the declining former town of Fort William,Ontario, this thesis surveys an abandoned industrial corridor that encircles thetown, severing it from the liminal water’s edge and landscape beyond. Viewedas a palimpsest, this site is considered beyond its most recent industrial usageto expose a place-specific natural/cultural terrain comprised of material andimmaterial 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 ofoutwardly expressing progress. It immerses itself within the in-between placesthat blur preconceived boundaries – natural and cultural, past and future, controlledand chaotic – in order to encounter the inherent existential qualities ofa site in transition.