Jacky Hiu Yeung Lee
Borders and Territories
Rumination of Ruination: The Regenerative Decay in the Post-industrial Trieste
Trieste, a modern port city, is highly dependent on the ever-changing and fluctuating maritime trade industry. Under a competitive ecology, its shoreline was frequently expanded and equipped with updated infrastructures, leaving the outdated buildings and machinery in a state of obsolescence, abandonment and gradual decay. The project is an attempt to regenerate a fragment of the derelict industrial waterfront into public spaces, not through (re)development based on heavy investment, but through an alternative possibility of reusing and recycling the industrial leftovers to regenerate new forms and typologies of public architecture for the dwindling city. By transforming a disused shipyard into a complex consisting of a recycling site, scrapyard, art studio, museum, park and swimming pool, they try not only to visualise the material consequence of the capitalist obsolescence from the industrial past, but also set up a paradigm of how the post-industrial world can tackle this issue through the act of reuse.