Beauty Redeemed - Recycling Post-industrial Landscapes

Coping with post-industrial sites is a pressing issue throughout Europe and North America. One point of departure for their general rediscovery was the revitalisation by Latz + Partner in the early 1990s of an abandoned steelworks as Duisburg-Nord Landscape Park; industrial relics were not demolished but seen as integral parts of the overall concept and imbued with new meanings and uses. Many more projects with a similar approach have since been executed and this book presents a selection of the most seminal, such as Chemetoff’s Île de Nantes, Parc del Clot in Barcelona, Hargreaves/PROAP’s Parque do Tejo e Trancão in Lisbon and Michel Desvigne’s Parc aux Angéliques in Bordeaux.

‘Beauty Redeemed’ offers a systematic framework for the consideration and use of post-industrial sites. These ‘left-overs’ are placed in their broad historical and aesthetic context, proceeding from the 19th-century Romantic fascination with ruins through present-day industrial decline as exemplified by Detroit to a renaissance of the transformed landscape. Transformation, understood as designing with the ‘as found’, forms the basis of this design theory; design work informed by a sensibility for redeemed beauty and grounded in the specific post-industrial landscape understood as temporary and mutable. 

English language edition. Richly illustrated.

The author of ‘Beauty Redeemed’ is Ellen Braae, Professor in Landscape Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Copenhagen.