Lost Corner of the City
Peiran Hu
The West Glasgow Ambulatory Chimney is a long disused chimney in Yorkhill, Glasgow. It was a facility of the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, which is now called West Glasgow Ambulatory Care Hospital.
“Man has always aimed at building high to the limits of his structural ingenuity. ” (Lord Holford) The feelings I experienced during my site visit, brought on by the lofty chimney, got me thinking about the senses of height. It is not a secret that we human seem to be constantly striving for height, from the very beginning until now, and for the foreseeable future.
As J.J. Korom shows, “We celebrate the push upward to be nearer the clouds and we celebrate our tussle with nature, gratified it allows us the notion of supremacy. We can now build higher than ever before and realize the celebration of the height is primal and constant.”
The idea of height seems to always relate to POWER. In ancienttime, it could be the power of nature or the power of death. Later in feudal society, it could be the power of the monarch or the powerof god. Now in the modern society, it could be the power of wealth. Regardless of the era, great heights always imply something non- everyday, high-cost and not easily achievable, and thus always point to the side of power, generating stronge feelings of either admiration or fear for individuals.
In this way, HEIGHT is the privilege of POWER while POWER becomes the denotation of HEIGHT. One proceeds from abstraction, the other from materiality, they both point to host the emotions and memories of the people they radiate.
In On Collective Memory, Maurice Halbwachs asks, “Why does society establish landmarks in time that are placed close together-and usually in a very irregular manner, since for certain periods they are almost entirely lacking-whereas around such salient events sometimes many other equally salient events seem to gather, just as street signs and other signposts multiply as a tourist attraction approaches?”
Talking back to my site, an unused chimney, who has been the host of social memory of chimneys? And who is being denied a voice here? Although today, when we talk about chimneys, we associate them with pejorative terms such as air pollution and toxic substances, however, historically, chimneys have not always been such a negative image. The origin of “chimney” can date back to the Romans, who drew smoke from their bakeries with tubes embedded in the walls. However, it was not until the First Industrial Revolution in the 1800s that “chimney” become common in households and city life. On the one hand, following the industrial revolution, tall industrial chimneys began to appear in cities such as London and Glasgow. At that time when tall buildings were yet common, these chimneys, symbolising industrial development, were the only constructions in the city that were as high or even higher than churches or palaces. For its part, industry represented progress across the ages, a great leap forward in productivity, and the possibility of a more advanced kind of city, not always juxtaposed with environmental concerns, as it is today.
The city of industry is a forest of chimneys. The people ofhis time, nobles and commoners alike, all looked up to this masterpiece of human development. Painters and poets sang its praises, and the smoke from the chimneys was like the luxuriant foliage of the trees. That generation lived in the shade of such “trees” and constantly looked up to these chimneys with pride and hope in the power of mankind, in a time before the concept of environmental protection ever appeared.
When looking at this left-behind chimney, this landmark of yesteryear that is no longer in the hands of the POWER that be, I see a possibility of encoding INDIVIDUAL MEMORY into COLLECTIVE MEMORY, a possibility of the revolution of the HOST.
Chimneys can be classified into two categories based on the substances they emit, those that emit water vapor and those that emit smoke. Since this chimney used to belong to a hospital, we deduced that it is more likely to be used as a chimney for burning hazardous substances such as medical waste. Based on this, we carried out an indoor restoration in terms of its structure, light, material, temperature and wind.
I designed the chimney as a unique experiential space where the interior of the chimney is divided into two parts: dream and reality.
People enter the chimney and are taken to the top of the chimney in a 10-minute lift. Each lift has a capacity of only one personand is equipped with a projection showing a documentary onthe history of the Chimney People. Once at the top, the journey officially begins.
Dream Unit, referring to the innocent dreams of the chimney sweep children. The space is bright and colourful with layers and layers of webs made of soft cotton threads. One climbs upwards in the dream world, and the unusual inner walls of the net draw one away from everyday physical movements, forcing one to make movements that fit the net to steady oneself.
Reality Unit, referring to the reality faced by the chimney sweepers. Here is a narrow lift, converted from the chimney’s original pipework, with a cold, dark interior where only the bright light overhead is visible. Here one plummets down to reach the next dream world.
The whole journey is a cycle of climbing up and falling down. During this process, people’s body movements are forced to change by the space, and they experience the memories of the chimney sweepers with their bodies.
