Article: Engineering Works and Scaled-down Models Or Industry Laid Bare (2007)

Title: Engineering Works and Scaled-down Models Or Industry Laid Bare
Author: Marc-Antonio Barblan
Conference reference: BigStuff 2007 - Beyond Conservation - Industrial Heritage Management, 11-14 September 2007
Link: click here (pdf, 11.2 Mb)

Note: Made available upon request of the author

From the Introduction:

The following remarks are based on a long-standing concern of mine and are related to several interventions in the field of industrial heritage. In view of the advent of new parameters - or the recent emphasis on certain trends - these reflections appear to me of the utmost urgency.
On the positive side, there has clearly been a potential increase in the conceptual and spatial field: be it the enlargement of Europe, the increased interdisciplinary and intercultural opportunities, endorsing the idea of the true interconnectedness of our universal heritage, as well as the realisation of the recently recognised status of immaterial heritage.
On the negative side, however, we must lament those ever-increasing, contemptible moves to cash in on culture in the wider sense, moves which reduce culture to a mere pretence, in which performance-mode takes over at the expense of critical discourse (this may well explain the casual approach to methodology which is so often the case); therefore the difficulty in constructing a complete picture, a comparative one, incorporating the requisite hierarchical order.

Without mentioning the worsening risks to climate and the environment, so much so in fact that water, which will figure prominently henceforth, is threatened in its essence, and will be the disputed prize of future conflicts.