Searching for a current topic. Reuse of industrial heritage in student projects at CTU in Prague

Although the systematic interest in industrial heritage in the Czech Republic goes back to the mid-1980s (and it can be said that it has been growing ever since), this layer of culture remains more endangered than before. Nowadays the main danger for abandoned factories is not their irreversible decay and devastation, but rather the aims of unscrupulous developers and land speculators to exploit industrial areas. Furthermore, they are also frequently damaged by inappropriate interventions during reconstructions or conversions. Thus we often witness a paradoxical and unfortunate situation in which a building was destroyed by interventions conducted in good faith to preserve it. At the same time, we can see an increasing diversity of approaches, ingenious interventions and improvisations including ambitious long-term plans, which clearly show what extraordinary potential these buildings offer in search of their reuse. Of course, we will never find a universal guide to the right approaches. However, it can be assumed that we find higher sensitivity and more contextual thinking among those architects who had already dealt with this topic during their studies. The aim of the project is therefore to collect, classify and subsequently evaluate the annual and diploma projects of conversions of industrial buildings which have been completed in studios at the Faculty of Architecture and the Faculty of Civil Engineering at the CTU since 2002, when the Research Centre for Industrial Heritage was established as part of the CTU. Besides mapping and documenting student works, the project aims to trace, verify and formulate more general principles: arguments for the reuse of abandoned buildings in terms of sustainable development and monument conservation as well as a space for contemporary architectural creation and as searching for current topics and tendencies of urbanism and architecture, not only in the pedagogical environment.