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Case: From abandoned steel factory to cultural tourism destination

This article summarizes relatively successful cases at home and abroad, and explores the new life of abandoned factory buildings through the improvement of cultural tourism formats and creative architectural design.

In the industrial era, industrial bases such as steel mills and mining plants carried the glory and dreams of a generation. With the development of the times, the industrial structure continued to adjust, and many industrial bases were gradually abandoned. These witnessed the development of the city. How can industrial sites escape the fate of being submerged by the times? With the support of culture and tourism, industrial heritage has regained new vitality. Here are some transformation cases that have successfully "turned waste into treasure".

1

SteelStacks Arts and Culture Park

SteelStacks is located in northeastern Pennsylvania. It was formerly the Bethlehem Steel Company. The company was established in 1857 and covers an area of ??1,800 acres. , once the second largest steel group in the United States, built 1,127 warships and the Golden Gate Bridge.

However, the stagnation of infrastructure, real estate, automobile and shipbuilding industries in the United States in the 1980s caused the steel market to face a severe situation of oversupply and demand. The factory was eventually forced to close, but the story did not end there. In 2005, BethWorksNow acquired the iconic blast furnace of the steel plant and a surrounding 126 acres of land from International Steel Group. The following year, it jointly developed the blast furnace of Bethlehem Steel Plant with Sands Group. Renovation and development of the area.

However, it seems difficult to support a new business format solely by relying on the century-old cultural IP of the blast furnace area of ??the abandoned steel plant and Bethlehem Steel Plant. In order to fully activate the area and introduce more people, the development company has provided free services to the area. The government provided 9.5 acres of land in the park, and the government lobbied the non-profit arts organization ArtQuest and PBS television station to occupy it.

The final SteelStacks Art and Culture Park is based on the original industrial heritage, unifying the site landscape and the style of the new buildings, and adding overhead corridors to connect the industrial heritage landscape, SteelStacks Art Park and the hotel complex. The commercial district provides a seamless connection between the steel plant and the newly built communities and commercial streets.

Among them, the key part of the transformation is to plan a curved road to run through the park, while meeting the outdoor open space needs of Levitt Pavilion, ArtQuest Center and PBS Performing Arts Center on both sides of it. Next, the blast furnace ruins become the background of the public space, pushing the Levitt Pavilion, which integrates art, entertainment venues and activities, onto the main axis opposite the main entrance of the park.

Inside the ArtsQuest Center building, music, art, and movies are almost never-ending—ArtsQuest, a non-profit arts organization, sponsors 150 to 170 music performances of any style in the Musikfest Café every year. This has brought huge traffic to the hotel business area. As of 2017, the park holds an average of more than 1,000 concerts every year, of which 13% of the passenger flow generated by the SteelStacks Cultural Park is converted into stays at the Sands Hotel on the east side of the park. It has continuously introduced new talents to the local area and created a large number of job opportunities. Today, SteelStacks has become a world-renowned arts, culture and entertainment park.

2

Chongqing Industrial Culture Expo Park

Chongqing Industrial Culture Expo Park is located in Dadukou District. It is built based on some industrial remains of the Chongqing Steel Prototype Steel Plant. It covers an area of ??142 acres and has a total scale of 140,000 square meters. It is composed of three parts: the industrial heritage park, the industrial museum and the cultural and creative industrial park. With the industrial cultural heritage as the core, it forms an integrated new industrial pattern.

Chongqing Iron and Steel Group is a large-scale steel conglomerate with a century-old history. Its predecessor was the Hanyang Iron Works founded by the late Qing government in China in 1890. The steel plant is not only the development and evolution history of an enterprise, but also the history of its development and evolution. The epitome and portrayal of the bumpy development of China's steel industry. In 2011, due to environmental protection relocation, the steel production system in the old Dadukou District was shut down. It was then transformed into the Chongqing Industrial Culture Expo Park. The Expo Park gathered "cultural tourism merchants" Integrated into one, through the promotion of culture and tourism, it promotes the development of business and revitalizes the area.

In the Industrial Heritage Park, there are precious industrial equipment exhibits such as the 8,000-horsepower twin-cylinder horizontal steam prime mover produced by the British Sheffield Company in 1905, as well as many themed sculptures, installation art and statues of industrial pioneers. It reflects the perfect combination of industrial culture and public art.

The Industrial Museum consists of the main exhibition hall, the "Steel Soul" Hall and the Industrial Heritage Park. It strives to create a pan-museum with innovative creativity, interactive experience, and themed scenes.

The Cultural and Creative Industrial Park organically combines pan-museums with cultural and creative industries, and is located in old factories and newly built LOFT spaces along the river to form a cultural and creative industrial park. It also has multiple spaces such as industrial offices, experiential commerce, sports and leisure, boutique hotels, public space and leisure communication areas.

Since the park opened in 2019, it has become an internet celebrity check-in spot, attracting many tourists.

Whether abroad or domestic, industrial relics are not cold steel and bricks, but witnesses of industrial civilization, carrying the culture and spirit of a city. As the wheels of the times roll forward, these industrial relics They should not be abandoned by the city, but need to be reactivated through reasonable development and transformation.

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