Abstract:
This thesis calls in to question the role of obsolescence in the progression of industrial economy. When production of material goods relating to a dying market sector reverse, what can be done with the resultant equipment in which use has lapsed? What can be salvaged from the abyss of uselessness to find purpose in a world that can so quickly see new global trends shadow the old? How can architecture revitalise that which suffers between requirements? Global oil and gas reserves are decreasing at an exponential rate. New sources are becoming difficult to obtain. With peak oil having been realised there will be continual redundancy in the industrial sector to accommodate growing demand. At this point, many industrial landscapes will be neglected and made redundant in the predicted flux of a global oil crisis. Mankind will need to find innovative solutions for the obsolete componentry comprising the rapidly declining industry. How can architecture occupy the ongoing flux of temporality? Resting momentarily between restrained and dynamic, it must become self-aware and shift continuously to avert stasis and ensuing redundancy. In acknowledgment of this, this thesis strives to establish a transient design methodology for landscapes that are unbalanced amongst scales of obsolescence. Limiting the reliance on permanence, architecture for industry becomes a dynamic link between the people, the landscape and the surrounding context from which it is produced. It aims to reform the fractured view of today’s industry and begin a symbiotic relationship with community that transcends the pressures of superfluousness. The synthesised platform of Port Taranaki serves as the site on which the prosperity of New Zealand’s petrochemical industry rests and where these temporal concerns are tested. I propose a Processing and Production Plant alongside a Museum of Energy and Infrastructure dedicated to the display of the remnants of the fossil fuel age and its corresponding extractive equipment. Assembled using the obsolete componentry from oil and gas exploration and the portal structures from redundant storehouse typologies, this intervention allows for a flexible construct that pre-empts architectural lethargy, continuing industrial production by linking people and place through architecture. It is a transition towards a post-industrial future of technological innovation that is greater than the sum of its parts.