Materials and Nothingness Structures and patterns in a post-industrial landscape

Materials and Nothingness. Structures and patterns in a post-industrial landscape

The materiality of cities is changing in the postindustrial era, as former industrial sites add an element of terrain vague to the urban texture. These sites perform a function in the city as in-between spaces that enable citizens to experience unregulated environments. The vacant lot exists as a form of nothingness that leaves room for acts and thoughts that grow out of intuitive needs since it has no preprogrammed plan. In Copenhagen, the Beauvais company created such a void when it abandoned its factory in Østerbro and moved production to rural Svinninge in the 1970s. When the old building burned down, the whole area was left to develop on its own, and today it exists as a rich texture of wild vegetation for recreational use. Geographer Tim Edensor, in his study Industrial Ruins (2005), investigates the development of abandoned industries and old factory buildings in Britain, to understand what they add by existing as elements of unpredicatabilty. He suggests that the vacant lot overgrown by weeds could be considered as a kind of nature reserve in the city, a hybrid environment that adds biodiversity and organic growth to otherwise desolate places (Edensor 2005, 42).
Edensor mainly focuses on the buildings and their new functions, while artist Lara Almarcegui in her practice approaches terrain vague in a broader perspective, developing guides for finding industrial ruins in Burgundy, France (2009) or wastelands and abandoned lots in Lund, Sweden (2005). Another artist with an interest in terrain vague was Robert Smithson, and in his essay "A Tour of The Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey" (1967), he tenderly and humorously treats the artefacts he finds in this industrial landscape as memorable sights.

Materials and Nothingness
Structures and patterns in a post-industrial landscape In this article, I offer a reading of the former factory site, now known as the Beauvais lot, through some texts by the manufacturer and designer William Morris . To capture the complexity of this post-industrial landscape I have also created a series of drawings in which the vegetation appears as patterns, informed by Morris's work as a designer. My original idea was to give an impression of the plants that were growing on the lot, since this would give an idea of what thrives on sites when left without interference. It is mostly plants that are considered weeds that blossom here, such as bindweed, nettles, brambles, and ground elder, but one can also find apple trees, golden rain, birches, and a chestnut tree. Since I wish to highlight the qualities that areas such as the Beauvais lot brings to the city, I wanted to elevate the weeds to make us appreciate them in the same way as the plants that we find in an ordinary garden. Morris studied plants in his nearby surroundings for his patterns, and I have therefore used them as a template for my own drawings to enhance the inherent beauty in the disorderly vegetation.
A visionary thinker who managed to trace the connection between production, landscape, craft, and politics in his writing, Morris reacted against the exploitation of early industrialization. A much more recent but similar approach can be found in psychoanalyst and philosopher Félix Guattari's essay The Three Ecologies (2000), which contributes social and psychological concepts to ecology. In a manner similar to Morris's efforts to create awareness of social injustice, Guattari's ideas broaden the field of ecology by acknowledging the psychological effects of environmental crisis. The function that the Beauvais lot has performed for its visitors could be understood as mental ecology, since the site offers a place with less regulations and control, and thus a sense of possibility. With this article I wish to explore the impact that industrialization has had on how we experience materials, and for this purpose I have analyzed Morris's patterns both as materiality and representation. My own drawings explore the vegetation on the Beauvais lot, and by presenting the plants as patterns I have tried to give them a structure that expresses how this environment exists as a noteworthy addition to urban life.

Materials
The impact of human behavior on our environment is making us aware of landscape in a new way. Instead of seeing natural habitats as places to visit and enjoy, we currently face a situation in which, in a sense, they are out of control. Global warming is changing the climate, resulting in torrential rain, hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires, as well as biodiversity loss. Old structures are incorporated into new models for urban design, usually with the aim to preserve former industrial buildings as historical sites, which consequently become monuments to a bygone Materials and Nothingness era. We have thus started a process in which we are rethinking our conceptions of how to interact with and look at the landscape. Instead of molding the landscape, we must adapt to the serious changes that lie ahead of us, and we must therefore to a greater degree regard what surrounds us as something that shapes us. Our current position is largely a consequence of what started with industrialization in the 19th century: an urge for growth and commerce, developed with little concern for the landscape, natural resources, or human beings involved in the process.
The Beauvais factory was established at Lyngbyvej and Rovsingsgade in Østerbro 1895 and was closed in 1968, when the company moved to their new factory in rural Svinninge. The old factory in Østerbro was made a protected building and could thus not be torn down when the municipality of Copenhagen acquired the lot in the following years. It was left abandoned and soon started to fall apart until it burned down, along with other buildings on the site.
The municipality cleared the site with the intention to turn it into a recreational area for local residents, but later decided to open it for development.
From 1983 the lot was left without much intereference from anyone but local users and the area slowly got wilder, with more trees and plants making the vegetation denser. Later a skatepark was established, attracting a lot of young people. Other visitors included children playing and people walking dogs or picking flowers and berries. At a certain point when homeless people started to camp there, the municipality indicated with signs at the entrances that it was forbidden to sleep on the premises. In 2019, the construction of public housing began on one part on the lot, a proposal called High Five, consisting of three five-sided towers, with the intention to keep the other part as a green area.
In his exploration of the post-industrial landscape, Edensor suggests that the overgrown and rewilded areas around the abandoned buildings could be regarded as a kind of nature reserve, something that the Beauvais lot is a successful example of: "The botanical colonization of derelict land and buildings is not a static process but changes over time depending upon the longevity of the abandoned site" (Edensor 2005, 43). His own photographs from his visits to these places accompany Industrial Ruins, focusing mainly on the buildings, especially interiors that depict remnants from when the factories were in use, as well as from recent, more obscure activities. In these pictures we find broken windows, useless machines, locker rooms, signs with instructions, and weeds breaking through the floor. But in one photograph I discover a fading wallpaper in William Morris's unmistakable style, a product of the Victorian era caught in one last, glorious moment. Of these dyes it must be enough to say that their discovery, while conferring the greatest honour on the abstract sciences of chemistry, and while doing great service to capitalists in their hunt after profits, has terribly injured the art of dyeing, and for the general public has nearly destroyed it as an art. Henceforward there is an absolute divorce between the commercial process and the art of dyeing. (Morris 1889) In her biography of Morris, experience that also taught him the costs of industrialization: pollution, smoke, and dirty rivers, as well as unhealthy working conditions. As he walked in and out of the factories, he became a witness to how the workers were treated. It was an exploitative system: long hours, little space, noise, and low wages. This further highlighted the split within him, since by being so hands-on in his pursuit of well-crafted products, he also came close to production. He was already familiar with the stately homes where the products would end up, since he often suggested which textiles and wallpapers would be suitable for particular places. But it was not only injustice that engaged him; it was also the joy of purposeful labor, which came as a revelation. Born into a class that did not need to work with their hands, Morris now discovered that he gained great pleasure from being close to materials and engaging in the design process, whether it be embroidery, weaving, or textile printing. He also reacted against the repetitive single tasks that factory workers had to endure, and he wanted to change the fact that they could gain no satisfaction from their work. In the text "A Factory as It Might Be"-published in 1884 in Justice, the weekly newspaper of the Social Democratic Federation-he attempts to give an example of how one might improve factories and create better conditions for the people working in them. He stresses that a day will come when we work for livelihood and pleasure, not for profit; and to achieve this, it is necessary that the factory should be a pleasant place.
To improve conditions for factory workers, he proposes that factories should be surrounded by gardens where workers can occupy themselves with gardening for relaxation from factory work. Here the satisfaction of pleasant manual work, as well as the opportunity to be outdoors, is proposed as a healthy addition to the monotonous work in the noisy factory. But the suggestion is also polemical, since he goes on to point out that factories actually have gardens already:

Materials and Nothingness
Impossible! I hear an anti-Socialist say. My friend, please to remember that most factories sustain to-day large and handsome gardens, and not seldom parks and woods of many acres in extent; with due appurtenances of highly paid Scotch professional gardeners, wood reeves, bailiffs, gamekeepers, and the like, the whole being managed in the most wasteful  (Smithson 1996, 70). the place it has been opposed by local residents. (Almarcegui, 2005, 20) Some of the described places have the same qualities as the Beauvais lot. Holmbergska parken, the garden of a former summer residence, has been established as a park, to be kept as wild as possible. But while Smithson and Almarcegui to some extent share a method, I find myself inspired by Morris's way of turning

Structures
Our relationship with what surrounds us is built upon sensations-tactile as well as visual-and an urge to categorize and seek relationships. Morris talks about rational growth in relation to his patterns, and I find it interesting that he uses rationality as a reference since it indicates an intellectual rather than emotional approach, and rationality and order is what motivated Linneaus when he developed his influential system to classify growing and living things.
In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault writes about classifying: "To observe then, is to be content with seeing-with seeing a few things systematically" (Foucault 2002, 146). Through representation, what we see can be analyzed and attached to language. Foucault uses Linnaeus as an example of how observation-the visual-becomes language. For this purpose, Linnaeus needed to find structures that could filter and limit what he observed: "His wish was that the order of the description, its division into paragraphs, and even its typographical modules, should reproduce the form of the plant itself. That the printed text, in its variables of form, arrangement, and quantity, should have a vegetable structure" (Foucault 2002, 147). It is fascinating to imagine how a whole system of knowledge has been constructed with this simple image. Through language and a systematic method, Linnaeus built a solid system with great impact. His Systema Naturae (1758), in which he classified plants according to their male and female sexual organs (stamens and pistils), became an important cornerstone for modern taxonomy. Systema Naturae is written in Latin, and it was through descriptions in this language that he managed to create a tool to categorize plants. Foucault points out how this enabled the visual to transform into structured language: "The plant is thus engraved in the material of the language into which it has been transposed, and recomposes its pure form before the reader's very eyes. The book becomes the herbarium of living structures" Materials and Nothingness (Foucault 2002, 147 Morris studied is arranged with formal elements that organize the growing vegetation on the surface. It is tempting to turn to Foucault again, since he makes a connection between memory and the perpetual growth in nature: "It is without doubt the continuity of nature that gives memory the opportunity of exercising itself, as when a representation, through some confused and illperceived identity, recalls another and makes it possible to apply to both the arbitrary sign of a common name" (Foucault 2002, 174). If we turn to Morris's patterns with this in mind, we discover fresh and direct observation surrounded by ornament-a representation. Sometimes we can recognize the flowers in the patterns, as in the delicious Honeysuckle (1876), but at other times we need to adjust our own image of a tulip to the one depicted in the wallpaper.
Morris discusses what he considers to be essential for a successful pattern in the lecture "Some Hints on Pattern-Designing," given to the Working Men's

College in London in 1881:
Rational growth is necessary to all patterns, or at least the hint of such growth; and in recurring patterns, at least, the noblest are those where one thing grows visibly and necessarily from another. Take heed in this growth that each member of it be strong and crisp, that the lines do not get thready or flabby or too far from their stock to sprout firmly and vigorously; even where a line ends it should look as if it had plenty of capacity for more growth if so it would. (Morris 1993, 278) Here Morris depicts his own patterns in language, and he describes their movement: the lines should not become too loose but stay within proximity of the other parts of the pattern. He also emphasizes that the pattern needs to offer space for growth, for a possibility to expand beyond the indicated area.
This contributes to the vitality of the surface, where the developing lines continue to unfold. But it is not just their vitality that makes these images so compelling; they also hint at something beyond themselves, thereby reminding us that they are a reminiscence of something experienced, just like our memories. Morris's patterns reach out toward an imagined territory, a chain of observations and interpretations that becomes a space in itself.

Nothingness
Although Morris reacted against the poor-quality products that industrialization brought, his own production was not purely handcrafted, but was accomplished with a pragmatic attitude. Morris introduced the idea of the conscious designer with a recognizable visual identity and an uncompromising approach to quality. His initiatives inspired the Arts and Crafts movement, which focused on craft, albeit with a relationship to industrial production. Links between art and industrialization can also be found among developers that used the fortunes they had amassed for art collecting.  I would like to return to Morris and his lecture on dyeing, specifically his description of the delicate yellow dyes. Yellow tones are those that resist light the least and are therefore the first to disappear: "Speaking generally, yellow dyes are the least permanent of all, as once more you may see by looking at an old tapestry, in which the greens have always faded more than the reds or blues; the best yellow dyes, however, lose only their brighter shades, the 'lemon' colour, and leave a residuum of brownish yellow, which still makes a kind of green over the blue" (Morris 1889). Morris focuses here on the fading colors of a tapestry, on something that slowly disappears, taking on different appearances in a chameleonlike fashion in the process. The Beauvais lot offers a similar space, a void filled with traces that take on new shapes year after year: the growing trees, the bramble bushes that cover everything else and occasionally are removed, the abandoned items that slowly decay and disappear under the vegetation. Morris returns to the tapestry in his lecture to point out that the faded parts still contribute to the whole story. He wishes to emphasize that natural dyes in the process of fading represent a space: Like all dyes, they are not eternal; the sun in lighting them and beautifying them consumes them; yet gradually, and for the most part kindly, as (to use my example for the last time in this paper) you will see if you look at the Gothic tapestries in the drawing-room at Hampton Court. These colours in fading still remain beautiful, and never, even after long wear, pass into nothingness, through that stage of livid ugliness which distinguishes the commercial dyes as nuisances, even more than their short and by no means merry life. (Morris 1889) This space, the slowly fading yarn in the tapestry, still exists as part of the tapestry, and yet is close to a sort of nothingness. I find this term compelling, since although Morris insists that the fading areas resist nothingness, he nevertheless invokes it as a possibility. The image is useful for comparisons with the abandoned lot, since it uses nothingness to reference a possible space. Like the faded yellows of the tapestry, the wasteland exists as something next to nothing, and yet it has a complex physical presence. And it is here that the void appears as a space with textures, a weaving together of vegetation, experiences, and memories, which transmits otherwise invisible stories about contemporary urban life. My own observations of the site has been used in drawings that turn structures in the vegetation into new patterns. Here the nothingness that the site represents is mapped through delicate lines with a pencil, combining layers of abstraction with precise renderings. The drawing is here used as a tool to investigate overlooked structures in the city, informed by Morris's revolt against industrialization, as well as Guattari's wish to expand ecology to both social and mental domains. By entering this green wasteland the visitor can experience something close to mental ecology, a space next to nothing in an otherwise regulated city. The nothingness in the Gothic tapestries that Morris refers to, the yellow dyes, exists in a similar manner in the drawings when the paper is left blank, as when a flower on the bindweed appears as a negative form among grey leaves. Between the lingering leaves and the bark on a tree, blank areas in the drawings elevate the overlooked and insignificant to a space in its own right.