Crafting the Landscape in an Active Steel Plant

About The Entry

This project reimagined a mixed-use landscape in an industrial context, which was located in one of the largest active steel plants in China. By taking on the idea of recrafting materials and space on the site, it envisions an alternative reality that bridges the ongoing industry and an aware public.

With the increasing awareness of sustainability and rapidly developed urbanization, traditional heavy industries are gradually being eliminated. However, steel production is still active in China due to the ongoing demands. Situated in such a dilemma, this project explores a new landscape paradigm that is not post-industrial, but rather on the edge of a post-industrial era.

On reasonable speculation, technology upgrades in the future would provide the factory with greater potential to reshape its position, whether economic, spatial, or cognitive. By recognizing different procedures and correspondingly required space, this project takes a phasing strategy and identifies various types of space to provoke the initial move.

The surgical intervention inserted into the working factory is showcased by various pilot projects after a careful study of the dynamic texture in the steel plant. Pilot projects range from sustainable biomass fields, the public center transformed from abandoned structures, the innovative warehouse-plaza with educational purposes and other potential spots on site.

The landscape intervention also embraces the idea of creative crafting in an industrial context - it sculpts both the spatial quality of physical materials as well as a cognitive relationship between active steel production and a broader community. By gleaning and composing the materials disposed of in steel production, this project exposes their meaning not only in the final product - steel, but also in its own existence of multiple materials during the process.

By understanding the iterative process of the steelmaking industry and gleaning the materials long-neglected, the project mingles what is physically meant to be steelmaking with what cognitively steelmaking could mean to the general public. The landscape acts as a facilitator to bring about public supervision, engagement as well as imagination to the industrial reality in a proactive way.