BIOTIC INDUSTRY: Assimilation of Industrial Corridors into Living Networks

BIOTIC INDUSTRY expands upon existing post-industrial landscape architecture principles and applies them to operational industrial manufacturing sites through responsive remediation on underutilized areas, the limitation of contamination by phytotechnologies, and the alteration of standard industrial land use frameworks.

Due to frequent changes in technology, industrial corridors contain abandoned, empty, inefficient, and underutilized areas where hazardous waste storage, incinerators, lime ponds, and more once were. These intermediary spaces bridge, border, or lie adjacent to operational facilities and have the potential to introduce pre-remediation processes that reconfigure the layout and cradle-to-grave methods underlying industrial zones. Industrial zoning is the blanket that allots the allocation of spaces to pollute and give way to human function and natural forms since the intricacies of each operation is too hastily retooling to accommodate nuance. While the design moves initiated in this thesis can be implemented globally, it is applied at the Lycra Factory in Waynesboro, Virginia, where petroleum becomes synthetic fiber.

This thesis proposes a ​responsive process of remediation that exposes swaths of contamination during the active operation of industrial sites by embedding a positive feedback loop of phytoremediation in standard manufacturing practices. The ​re-use of materials in situ and the ​insertion of trees, shrubs, and grasses within the gaps of severed asphalt and concrete produces​ forms that challenge the fetishized outcomes of post-industrial landscape architecture. The resulting form, from recycled ground materials and efficiency of machinery, defines a contaminant’s site influence and is rendered for an engaged public. These forms seek to connect to the surrounding ​ecological and urban fabric, challenging the public/private interface and the safety of these sites, and therefore, appropriating the ethical integrity of industrial processes.

By rerouting the trajectory of our future in manufacturing, technological innovation, and zoning allowances, industrial destruction can be curtailed by designing spaces for the complex environmental processes that balance the ecological health of these hydrological edges and remedy their effects within their bounds. Communities once fragmented by voids of circulation and human familiarity will now have a visceral connection to manufacturing processes and the social-ecological ideal of a society reliant on industry.