ARCHITECTURES OF COAL AND MODERN EUROPE

Introduction

After centuries, coal mining is ending in Europe. Few will be sorry to say goodbye to an industry that epitomizes the causes and effects of climate change.

Environmental Impact

While its environmental impact is now starkly and painfully obvious, Architectures of Coal and Modern Europe (ACME) explores another side of coal mining whose legacies and residues remain in various and often unexpectedly progressive forms.

Architectural Innovation

It argues that, responding to the unique conditions of coal mining—underground working practices, labour struggles, economic primacy, and social and environmental degradation—architecture emerged as both site and transmitter of an intense and unprecedented level of technological and social innovation. Here, advanced definitions of the social contract were developed and tested.

Methodologies and Ecologies

ACME will provide a new synthesis of methodologies, including architectural visualization, to reappraise their significance by exploring and establishing the architectures of coal as ecologies. These include:

1. Forms
2. Systems
3. Networks
4. Connections

These elements existed both within and across the buildings and landscapes coal mining created.

The Coalscape

It argues that these ecologies were pivotal to the creation of what needs to be recognized as a coal mining pistm—the coalscape—a pervasive, interdependent network of beliefs and practices that enfolded geologies, energies, bodies, and space. This network exerted a significant influence on the social and spatial foundation of modern Europe, including its welfare state projects and the origins of the European Union.

Geographic Focus

By examining this overlooked and mostly disappeared collective of architectures and landscapes in Belgium, France, Poland, and the United Kingdom, ACME will not only reveal how it represents a neglected but fundamental contribution to modern Europe but also provide a crucial new piece of intellectual infrastructure.

Rethinking Relationships

This infrastructure will help to rethink the critical intimacies between our energy sources, cultural and social lives, and the built environment that have contributed to the Anthropocene.