In October of 2004, the Museo de Medicina Laboral (Museum of Labor Medicine), opened to the public in Real del Monte, State of Hidalgo, Mexico. The museum, located on the grounds of what had been the ...Hospital Minero (Mining Hospital), was a building complex conceived, built, and operationalized at the height of Mexico’s Industrial Revolution and the region’s only medical facility specializing in the healthcare needs of miners and their families. Utilizing historical analysis, the hospital reveals contradictions frequently embodied by the era’s Modernist built environments. Inaugurated in 1907, the hospital was the culmination of the United States Smelting Refining and Mining Company (USSRMC) and its Mexican subsidiary, Compañía Real del Monte y Pachuca’s (CRMyP) efforts to bring healthcare to its employees while maximizing production. On one hand, the hospital’s design and operation expressed an optimism wrought by the dissemination of positivist and utilitarian philosophies and economic growth spurred by technological innovation; on the other, growing wealth inequality and deteriorating, often brutal, labor conditions.
Nearly 120 years later, the hospital again embodies a global reality. In contemporary post-industrialist economies, once these built environments cease being productive, they are usually abandoned or demolished; only a few are transformed and repositioned for other uses. As the region’s mining industry ceased productivity, the hospital was first abandoned and later rescued by a newly privatized enterprise that donated the medical building complex to a non-for-profit civil association focused on mining heritage. Now the Museum, an architectural expression that fused global and local economic, technological, and aesthetic sensibilities, has become an example of commodified didactic heritage.
In October of 2004, the Museo de Medicina Laboral (Museum of Labor Medicine), opened to the public in Real del Monte, State of Hidalgo, Mexico. The museum, located on the grounds of what had been the ...Hospital Minero (Mining Hospital), was a building complex conceived, built, and operationalized at the height of Mexico’s Industrial Revolution and the region’s only medical facility specializing in the healthcare needs of miners and their families. Utilizing historical analysis, the hospital reveals contradictions frequently embodied by the era’s Modernist built environments. Inaugurated in 1907, the hospital was the culmination of the United States Smelting Refining and Mining Company (USSRMC) and its Mexican subsidiary, Compañía Real del Monte y Pachuca’s (CRMyP) efforts to bring healthcare to its employees while maximizing production. On one hand, the hospital’s design and operation expressed an optimism wrought by the dissemination of positivist and utilitarian philosophies and economic growth spurred by technological innovation; on the other, growing wealth inequality and deteriorating, often brutal, labor conditions. Nearly 120 years later, the hospital again embodies a global reality. In contemporary post-industrialist economies, once these built environments cease being productive, they are usually abandoned or demolished; only a few are transformed and repositioned for other uses. As the region’s mining industry ceased productivity, the hospital was first abandoned and later rescued by a newly privatized enterprise that donated the medical building complex to a non-for-profit civil association focused on mining heritage. Now the Museum, an architectural expression that fused global and local economic, technological, and aesthetic sensibilities, has become an example of commodified didactic heritage.
Abstract This article aims to make the European professional audience acquainted with the architecture of an important southern African city. Additionally, the author hopes to familiarise this ...audience with the cultural nuances and character of this city, while trying to maintain distance as a native of the city. South Africa is famous for its significant natural and wildlife treasures. Internationally the history of this country’s politics and developing democracy are also well known. From famous political leaders overcoming the harsh and hateful Apartheid laws to more world-renowned medical practitioners performing ground-breaking medical procedures: the impact of South African global contributions cannot be overlooked. However, there is significant oversight in the appreciation of the architecture and analyses of the urban conditions in the country. Pretoria is the administrative capital of the Republic of South Africa and contains a substantial oeuvre of built works that is testament to the numerous international and local cultural influences. Thus, it was deemed necessary to present the architectural and artistic responses from the modernist period (late 1920s – 1970s). The Pretoria Regionalist style, sometimes styled as the Third Vernacular, is a contextually inspired, and unique Transvaal-esque mutation of the machined and purist aesthetic of the Modernist Movement (1920s – 1960s). This architectural oeuvre is presented within the historical context of the founding and evolution of South Africa. Hence, eight contextually appropriate and architecturally significant edifices representing the modernist architecture of the early 20th century are broadly discussed.
At the shoreline, human and ocean activities often act in unproductive tension with one another. This article draws from encounters between the modernist architecture in the port city of Toamasina in ...Madagascar and the activities of the Indian Ocean at that location to sense how human-ocean binary lines might become more porous. The first part of the article sketches a material-discursive theory of the weathered hole in modernist architectural surfaces. It explores the hole as a vital collective of queer otherings to the specific land-centred individualistic subject-hood of modernist Man, a specific figuration of a human who draws binary lines to separate itself out from the "natural world". The second part of the article argues that artistic inquiry is well positioned to sense into the activities of the hole. It looks to how the hole at the surface of modernist Man can co-shape the specific human-ocean relationship that forms at this shoreline. Such inquiry is explored through my solo exhibition titled Static Drift, held at the Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg in 2021. Sensing, the exhibition reveals, has the potential for listening to binary lines as they erect a surface that both pushes away yet also receives what has been pushed. In Static Drift, being vulnerable through human perceptions was highlighted as a critical mode for sensory attunement to the relationships that form at such surfaces. This article argues that the sonic is a useful sensory mode for opening perceptions toward what is not yet perceived in surface-hole relationships. The sonic opens sites for ontological thinking into human-ocean relations by sensing into the re-orienting potentials that noise offers for thinking about disrupting binaried surfaces.
The purpose of the article is the general characteristics of military residential architecture built in the 1920s and 1930s in the 2nd Polish Republic. In the newly restored Poland the most pressing ...problem was the improvement of the housing conditions of the population. The military, who contributed the most to the reinstating of independence held special privilege with the state officials. Therefore, the problem of their quartering was resolved with utmost preference. After an unsuccessful period of trial and error with traditional and light timber frame construction the government addressed this problem systemically establishing the Military Accommodations Fund with a dedicated budget for creating typified, repeatable solutions. The MAF commissioned specific designers, held open as well as limited competitions and hired a cadre of architects and engineers to come up with designs that could rapidly and cost effectively replenish the housing base with functional, hygienic solutions. Because the MAF was well funded, the most prominent polish modernist architects readily cooperated with the organization making Polish interwar architectura militaris an engine of modernization.
The late modernist architectural heritage of Central and Eastern Europe has undergone a peculiar transformation in the last couple of years. I consider this transformation from the perspective of the ...taming of ugly late modernist buildings into harmless miniatures as embedded in the grander phenomenon of architectural reconstructivism, concomitant with the demolition of late modernist building stock. This article aims to explore the current trend for reconstructivism in architecture by applying a two-fold conceptual framework, projection as a discursive method and Mark Cousins’s theory of ugliness to inspect the interwovenness of diverse socio-cultural factors by unraveling the manifold ways in which late modernist architectures are perceived with unease and discomfort in post-socialist contexts. These hyoptheses are tested in the case of the Electrical Power Distribution Station by architect Csaba Virág in Budapest.
