Pre-emptive Transformation
Benjamin Wells
Pre-emptive Transformation
Benjamin Wells benjaminwells.eu
Cities are full of physical structures that enable, fuel and glorify a narrative of growth. Factories, shopping malls, transport networks, office towers, speculative housing, power stations - all are products of, but also perpetuators of, the dogma of constant and limitless growth.
These industries may be evidently unsustainable, yet we politely wait for them to fade (or indeed crash) into obsoletion before we begin to consider how their spatial legacies might be transformed. We may then seek to adapt and refurbish, immortalising these temples of consumption, or demolish, perpetuating the demand for future growth.
This project outlines an alternative - pre-emptive transformation. This strategy anticipates the inevitable decline of growth-based industries, and utilises the process for common good. By pre-emptively hacking these industry’s spatial dependencies, the project circumnavigates the usual procedures of decline, obsoletion, ruin and demolition, instead finding potential in the occupation and transformation of existing resources.
The project depicted here speculatively explores the potential of a pre-emptive process of transformation. The building in question is a monolithic fish market - one of the world’s largest - in the Northern Japanese city of Ishinomaki. Built to exemplify the city’s recovery from the devastation of the 2011 tsunami, much of the 1km-long superstructure now lies redundant - the consequence of critically depleted fish stocks, an ageing and shrinking workforce, and the steady decline of the city that once supported it.
The project proposes an architectural framework for absorbing the market’s redundancy, through the introduction of a network of parasitic interventions. These interventions bring a civic infrastructure – housing, organisations, restaurants, public spaces – into a once exclusively industrial zone. This orchestrates friction between two usually autonomous entities - industry and city - and spatialises their mutual dependency. This, over time, has potentially radical consequences.
An industry is pushed toward accountability, and a public is activated through awareness and proximity. This may prove mutually beneficial for both a stagnating industry and a shrinking city, by providing much needed space for dwelling and civic engagement whilst encouraging and enabling an industry to operate within its means. It is thus a proposal for transformation - the redefinition of an urban paradigm by consolidating previously isolated events, activities and communities.
The building is colonised with an accumulation of individual cells each suspended and accessed from the existing roof structure, and interconnected at various levels. These cells are indiscriminate of function, defined instead by the regularity and repetition of the superstructure that supports them, and the industry that continues to operate beneath them.
These cells may provide inhabitable spaces for local residents, or intimate sushi bars where international businessmen can dine with local fisherman, market stall owners with tourists.
At points these cells converge to establish larger organisational structures, allowing more civic activities to take place whilst physically interrupting the industry below.
A translucent mesh is hung around the perimeter of the building, marking it as a single monolithic plinth and defining its roof as a new ground plane - the field from which the intervening activities descend. This screen rises each evening as the fishing fleet returns, allowing the building to process the day’s catch.
Perhaps these two realms would eventually reach a state of equilibrium, in which the industry is restricted to a sustainable level by the interruption of alternative functions, and the city reaches a point of density optimum for its faltering population.
The introduction of civic spaces causes the formerly industrial space to become inclusive and radically open - the opposite condition of the market as it exists. This monolith provides the structure, the shelter and the cohesion to facilitate the densification of a shrinking city, and the market’s redundancy is utilised and diversified before it becomes obsolete. This strategy embraces restricted growth and the negotiation between an abundance of activities, providing a framework for their coexistence.
And what of Oslo? Could a strategy of pre-emptive transformation be deployed to occupy Oslo’s growth-based industries?
Equinor Oslo Headquarters, Fornebu Norway’s largest oil and gas company
Cruise ship, Port of Oslo One of 100 cruise calls per year
Oslo S mall, Ă˜stbanehallen Oslo’s central shopping mall
Bjørvika Barcode and neighbouring housing, Bjørvika Speculative housing built as part of the Fjord City redevelopment
Oslo Airport, Gardermoen The second-busiest airport in the Nordic countries
Benjamin Wells benjaminwells.eu Autumn 2019
Pre-emptive Transformation is supported by The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture (KADK), the Master’s programme Political Architecture: Critical Sustainability, and the Oslo Architecture Triennale.