There has been growing disquiet about the reach and restrictive nature of historic area controls in recent years, with some critics arguing that UNESCO listings of historic cities, for example, leads to a kind of "urbanicide." Conversely, some preservation advocates have been alarmed by the tendency for cities to encourage and support architecturally alien interventions in highly valued and formally recognized historic areas. Consequently, there is an emerging discussion around the level of deference that is appropriate in such places and about the degree of aesthetic disjunction and difference that should be tolerated. This paper proposes, however, that the issue cannot be satisfactorily resolved by resorting only to character guidelines, nor solely to conservation methodology or planning rules of thumb. While the outcome is paramount, we argue that it is an ethic of participation in the context, rather than a required aesthetic, that better drives new architectural projects in valued historical environments.

The mines of Butte, Montana led the world in the supply of copper from 1887 through the First World War. This period corresponds in human history with a new acceleration in the scale of the industrialized production of minerals, as the geography of extraction expanded. That scale of production required industrial infrastructure of tremendous size and complexity, creating cultural landscapes of extraction on a vast new scale, and leading to environmental impacts of a severity not previously seen. Such characteristics make the preservation of sites embodying the history of industrialized extraction daunting, as can be seen in the region embracing Butte and Anaconda, Montana. The legacy of environmental damage caused by the mining industry at Butte and Anaconda has created the largest Superfund site in the United States. Unfortunately, Superfund remediation is often incompatible with the preservation of some historic features of mining's industrial infrastructure. This article suggests how such a vast landscape of extraction around Butte and Anaconda can be interpreted through judicious attention to large historic landscape features that survive, that are compatible with and often integrated into the Superfund remediation, and that help to convey the complexity and scale of historical industrialized mineral extraction.

Photographic archives are a potential source of knowledge in industrial heritage. This paper deals with the case of the main mining sites developed in Francoist Spain to produce energy. Historic photographs are not only a description of the original forms, dispositions, and uses of an industrial complex, nor are they only a register of social implications of labor. They contribute to recognition of a more complex understanding of the heritage significance of obsoletes landscapes nowadays. This paper analyzes the photographic archives as an aesthetical footprint related to the narration of meanings, symbols, and identity.

Landscapes Of Extraction Frank Matero Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Slate quarry, Slatedale, Penn. (Photo by Joseph E. B. Elliott, 2000) [End Page 2] Among the oldest of technologies, the extractive industries refer to those processes that involve the removal and processing of raw materials from the earth: mines, quarries, collieries, oil and gas refineries, cement plants, and the heavy clay industries (brick, tile, and terra cotta). These processes transformed entire regions and markets, creating a much altered landscape with vast and deep quarries, pits, and mines; enormous furnaces, smelters, and kilns; fabrication shops and mills; and transportation networks to bring raw materials in and product out. Entire worker communities with houses, schools, churches and synagogues, pool halls, and stores were created to keep local labor close at hand. Many such sites, while rich in historical and architectural value, are also toxic environmental brownfields, thus making them especially problematic for contemporary reuse. The intersection of geology, technology, and culture, these places were an important part of modern life, and their stories are often still accessible through the visual testimony of the land, their structures, and their machinery, as well as in the stories of those who labored there. In recent years this industrial legacy has been proposed as holding the key to regional revitalization by "regeneration through heritage," not only in the preservation and possible reuse of these sites, but as catalysts for reviving and maintaining the social and cultural fabric of their surrounding communities and natural environment. Cultural and environmental conservation have become powerful partners in the reclamation of these complex and often compromised places through ecological and social as well as architectural concerns. 2013 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Kenneth Hudson's groundbreaking book and manifesto on "industrial archaeology," the "mongrel" field he first named as the bastard offspring of industry and archaeology.1 Today the remains of industry past now dominate the global landscape, which is littered with the evidence of former industrial activities, and many of these places, now abandoned, hold latent value for their transformation and reuse. In the United States, Lawrence Halprin's 1967 conversion of San Francisco's Ghirardelli Chocolate Company headquarters into an integrated retail and dining complex and Richard Haag's 1971–76 Gasland Park in Seattle led the way to reuse. Today, myriad examples—driven in part by building booms in the 1970s and '80s, as well as by historic rehabilitation tax credits stemming from the Tax Reform Act of 1976—have since followed. Recent initiatives such as the Industrial Heritage Reuse Project by the Preservation League of New York State are specifically examining the reuse potential of several abandoned industrial buildings in Albany to provide model approaches in similar urban [End Page 3] contexts elsewhere. But many other less adaptable sites, such as brick yards, cement plants, and quarries of landscape scale, pose enormous difficulties for preservation and reuse. Despite the recent popularity of industrial chic, critics now question whether this form of "adhocism"—that is, the improvisation of new, unrelated uses devoid of meaning and interpretation—has led to, at best, a polite taming of industrial heritage, and, at worst, its grotesque disfigurement in the name of gentrification and short-sighted corporate marketing. According to the 2010 symposium "Retooling Industrial Heritage,"2 a shift in thinking is now required for more sustainable preservation: thematic approaches that examine the problems and potential based on the original industrial processes, consideration and interventions at the landscape scale, ecological as well as architectural thinking, and, finally, human connections through past and current associations. As Sir Neil Cossons has keenly observed, "the world came of age in the twentieth century[;] a century endowed at its outset with immense industrial power, widespread prosperity, and emerging technologies that were to affect the lives of every person on the planet."3 Why invest in preserving these former industrial landscapes? As proven elsewhere, this industrial legacy often holds the key to revitalization of a region by "regeneration through heritage," not only in the preservation and possible reuse of these sites, but as catalysts for reviving and maintaining the social and cultural fabric of their surrounding communities and reclamation of the natural environment. First...

Environmental determinism—the idea that the environment, including architecture, can shape behavior—linked asylums and dormitories. In both cases, the architecture of carefully planned structures reformed the body and reeducated the mind. When offering therapies for mental illness, nineteenth-century psychiatrists claimed that the purpose-built asylum would not only change a patient’s conduct, but also cure his or her mental disease. In the case of higher education, college officials (relying on the model of Oxford and Cambridge) encouraged students to live on campus in dormitories, in order to build life-changing friendships and strengthen their moral fiber. The dormitories themselves made such personal development possible—living at home or in a boarding house offered no such advantages. In contrast with their Victorian forbears, present-day psychiatrists do not make sanguine, optimistic predictions about the ability of an asylum to cure mental illness, but today’s residence life experts depend on an unacknowledged faith in environmental determinism. Reasons to live in a residence hall in 2015 include: “to experience personal growth with opportunities to gain independence and display leadership,” and “to learn principles of civility among roommates and neighbors.”

This lecture was delivered at Tunbridge Wells on February 16, 1858, and later reprinted in The Two Paths, being Lectures on Art, and its application to Decoration and Manufacture (1878). It is a typical piece of Ruskin’s lecturing style (not least in its length) and range of reference. He seeks at the start (this is omitted here) to position himself vis-à-vis his audience, noting a childhood visit to the town and explaining that he did not have any drawings to display and musing on what he might be able to communicate to them that evening. Then he explores how iron is used and received in the three areas that his title announces, and in the process admits—as he notes in the 1878 Preface—to “find them full of things which I did not know I had said.” He notes that his address is directed to “the general student, and to indicate their practical bearing on modern design,” which law he describes as “the dependence of all noble design, in any kind, on the sculpture or painting of Organic Form.”—John Dixon Hunt

Vandalism constitutes a continuous phenomenon throughout history. It can be described as an interaction between people and their material environment. Because of its nature it captures the interest of material culture’s scholar. In this paper, several sociopolitical and aesthetic aspects of the phenomenon are examined by the conservator’s point of view. The sociopolitical background of the act, the role of established and dominant social values and the role of the single person or of a minority are among them. It is argued that these sociopolitical dimensions of the topic that initially might seem irrelevant with conservation practice constitute the actual foundation upon which conservation of cultural heritage is based. The conscious conservator has to be aware of this complicated web of contradicted values and significances when standing in front of a vandalized object. Thus, the conservation decision making turns out to be a rather human-centric rather than an object-oriented approach.