Building on a brownfield site is a complicated endeavor. Such sites lie at the point in which history, culture, neglect, and pollution converge. The standard approach is to create an architecture which borrows heavily from the industrial past of the site: condos masquerading as factories. These buildings all fail. They fail because one cannot recreate the architecture of the past. One cannot copy the patina of an old factory, the dirt, and rust, one cannot copy the lines that have been drawn and redrawn as the factory has expanded or transformed. I am proposing that there is a way to create a patina. That there is a way to understand the latent history of a site. We must create an architecture of the site by turning the vile, the neglected, the castaway, and the pollution into a noble patina thus connecting to the site in a powerful and meaningful way.
