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NUMBER 84 2nd Quarter, 2019 CONTENTS REPORT • Not Just Carmen: Spain’s Tobacco Heritage, Carolina Castañeda López WORLDWIDE • Alexandria’s Karmouz Tram Workshop, Mirhan Damir • Toward Sustainable Conservation: Pingtung Tobacco Factory, Szu-Ling Lin • The Industrial Heritage of Modern Iron- and Steel- making in Europe, Part II, Rolf Höhmann After 300 years, tobacco production in Spain is down to the last factory, leaving monumental • Early Sonar and Submarine Archaeology, Zachary Liollio city centre buildings like Seville’s Real Fábrica de Tabaccos, shown here in 1856, around the country. See the Report on page 3. Photo: Wilkipedia Commons. and Justin McIntyre • The Management Plan for Campamento Chuquica- mata, Jaime Migone Rettig • Legal Protection for Mobile Heritage, Anders Svensson OPINION • The Heritage Potential of International Oil, James Douet THE NIZHNY TAGIL CHARTER IN THE ECOLOGICAL AGE WORLD HERITAGE MATTERS • Evaluation: The Process Explained, Stephen Hughes Colm Murray, Architecture Officer of the Heritage Council in Ireland. MODERN INDUSTRIAL MUSEUMS • Reconversion of the Porto Tram Museum, Ana Isabel The Nizhny Tagil Charter for the Industrial Heritage recognises the ‘pro- Lino and Maria Leonor Botelho found’, ‘revolutionary’ changes wrought by industrialisation since the end of the 18th century. But it proposes only positive values for this form of CONFERENCE NEWS heritage: no thought for the rust belt of de-industrialised or post-indus- • Off-site symposium Creators of Industrial Buildings, trial urban landscapes in Europe or America, or the Chernobyl exclusion Prague, 26 and 27 October 2018 zone, in place since the 1986 uncontrolled radioactivity release which rendered a wide area uninhabitable, or the causes of a mass killings in BOOK REPORT industrial accidents such as happened at Bhopal in 1984. Nor does it • Monument – Patrimony – Heritage, Industrial Heri- create a normative or ethical framework in which the industrial heritage tage and the Horizons of Terminology, Simone BOG- can contribute to an understanding of our current predicament: how to NER, Birgit FRANZ, Hans-Rudolf MEIER, Marion make the trajectory of technocratic consumerist materialist development STEINER (Eds), review by Massimo Preite ‘sustainable’. Nor does it guide a conservator through the difficult ethical • Beebe & Clegg: Their Enduring Photographic Legacy, dilemmas which are particular to the industrial heritage. For industrial John Gruber and John Ryan, review by Betsy Fahlman heritage conservation to become a resonant and relevant societal project, its normative principles need to acknowledge and engage with the ‘dark CONFERENCE CALENDAR satanic mills’. There is no mention in the Charter of the implication of industrial heri- TICCIH Bulletin No. 84, 2nd Quarter 2019 OPINION tage in the ‘technologisation’ of human society, in the materialist tic examples’ or ‘the singularity of unique sites’ should be identi- human presence in the biosphere, in the political economies of fied is not elaborated. It is, for example, a significant characteristic capitalism and socialism, in the reinforcement or construction of of each site of manufacture that it has ‘trumped’ a preceding pro- the class system in many societies, or in the alienation of humans cess in terms of efficiency, location or cost-effectiveness, and many from their labour through wages. claims for priority in conservation made for sites are based on ‘firsts’. The obverse of this celebration of innovation is rivalry and The requirement of manufacturing to be efficient and to use the redundancy, unless an overarching normative framework of the most competitive processes, required unsentimental and repeti- significance of industrial heritage to society is defined. Similarly, tive change to the machinery, production processes, and to the the dichotomy between some things being important for being buildings which housed them. This inevitably and characteristically ‘unique’, and others simultaneously for being ‘typical’, ought to be leaves behind in factory buildings the trace of multiple previous resolved. Both depend on having a scientific overview, but neither configurations, having no regard for the integrity of previous states. is by itself a marker of significance. The charter refers to evidential values explicitly seven times. The b. The Charter refers to ‘the universal value of evidence’, prioritisation given to the evidential value is rooted in the ephem- without recognising the simple large-scale lessons that ought to erality of the subject matter and the preoccupations of archaeolo- be derived from the ‘profound historical consequences’ of indus- gists with the skills they can deploy. Heritage can be used for other trial heritage. We live in a world that has been transformed by the purposes. The instrumental benefits to be derived from conserva- industrial revolution, and we should use its evidence to question tion generally have provided the justification for public expendi- whether that transformation is tenable or sustainable in any sense. ture on conservation. However, the preoccupation in this Charter The song ‘We Work the Black Seam’ by Sting provides a relevant with evidential value neglects the other types of value that engage normative framework through which to negotiate this legacy: it is the public, or the resources of public authorities, to act. not unreasonable to expect that a Charter that intends to moti- vate people to conserve industrial heritage should contain a simi- The Charter gives contradictory indicators as to how re-useable lar thoughtful ethical framework. the industrial heritage is, an especially difficult issue. The eviden- tial value leads to recommendations to maximise the retention of c. In the factory, time ends when its product is sold. Whole historic fabric, but this constrain re-use: industrial buildings either sites, and systems of production, are abandoned or discarded house redundant machines or they lose their defining fabric to a when the profit margin evaporates. The ephemeral essence of new use. The Charter does not provide a clear conceptual frame- buildings, machines and products of industrialisation points to a work in which adaptive re-use and evidential value can be recon- different conception of time to that normally used in monument ciled. Where does the ethic to preserve machinery in situ end, and conservation. The conservation ethic to ‘prolong the cultural life adaptive re-use begin? of the object’ with its simple view of the longue durée, does not fit easily with utilitarian profit-making, guaranteed obsolescence, The social value of heritage buildings, places, landscapes or objects extraction and exploitation that point to industrial culture’s ‘life can bring people into relationship with each other. We can con- out of balance’. sider ‘Geographies of manufacture’ to define the social impact of the industrial revolution, with the resulting large-scale the systems d. The Venice Charter, in its opening sentence, provides a of intense production and consumption - local, national and inter- reason to protect monumental buildings: they are ‘imbued with national - and the changes it wrought in relations between vast messages from the past’. The question ought to be asked ‘why is numbers of people, that it created. This sense of social value is it important for society or the State to place a high value on the only faintly reflected in the Charter. It is notable that the worker industrial heritage?’ The motivations appear to be technical inter- in a factory is adjunct to a machine, which is related to other ma- est in processes as such (not products), scientific history, national chines and therefore other workers only through subjugation to pride, class pride, the romance of the ruin. With its critical ap- the logic of manufacturing, of the production line. proach to materialism, the green agenda throws a different light on the processes of production and consumption asking if they Acknowledging that the original drafters of the Charter saw it as are ‘ecologically sustainable’. having an advocacy purpose generally for the industrial heritage, rather than guiding practitioners as to how to conserve it (as the e. The enormous scale of some large factories and their Venice Charter was written to do), the following conservation sites presents a distinctive industrial heritage challenge: obsoles- issues, which regularly emerge at the level of the site or project, cence that has landscape-scale effects. This suggests a land-use should be addressed if the Charter is ever revised. planning response. The Charter does not address how the partic- a. The basis on which ‘the most significant and characteris- NIZHNY TAGIL CHARTER, CONTINUED, PAGE 5 2 TICCIH Bulletin No. 84, 2nd Quarter 2019 2 REPORT The Madrid tobacco factory has been partially reconverted into an exhibition space and social centre. (Carolina Castañeda, 2016) famous in Prosper Mérimée’s story. The need for tax revenue dur- SPAIN ing the 19th century coupled with the increase in tobacco con- sumption supported several more generations of factories, most of them built in ports, from the pioneer in Seville up to the most NOT JUST CARMEN: SPAIN’S recent in Tarragona and Malaga which were constructed in the TOBACCO HERITAGE first third of the last century. Dr Carolina Castañeda López, architect For the Seville building, the military engineers responsible drew on French models of royal manufactories. However, the Spanish The state-owned tobacco factories in Spain, built