Digging Cultures of Production Using Design Practice: Transforming the Main Oxygen Factory Workshop in Shougang, Beijing

The paper aims to deepen the situatedness of the mega-event as an accelerator and rhetorical incubator of architectural practice, in particular translating the reactivation of an industrial site into a national manifesto for industrial heritage reuse. The observation revolves around the renovation of the Main Workshop of the Oxygen Factory Complex in the Shougang Steel Factory. Shougang is a former danwei in Beijing that in the early 2000s was gradually dismantled to limit pollution for the XXIX Olympic Games (2008); a few years later, when Beijing was the first city hosting both the Summer and Winter Olympics, it was selected to host the Big Air discipline for 2022 Winter Games becoming as well the first Olympic venue within an industrial site. Although much of its heritage has been demolished, Shougang still embeds the cultural, social, and economic legacy of Chinese industrial history. The authors, as part of the Politecnico di Torino/Department of Architecture and Design/China Room, developed the refurbishment of the Main Workshop in collaboration with Atelier TeamMinus and Architectural Design and Research Institute of Tsinghua University, in charge of the entire transformation of the Olympic site. The case is deployed as a privileged observation stance for a retrospective reflection in action grasped through the unpacking of three main design issues. Such issues are used to depict the relapse of transcultural socio-technical patterns. The three observed nodes hence test the operative margins ascertained from the perspective of both the contingent environment, or trends and techniques deployed, and revealing how much the design choices have been influenced from an aesthetic and technological point of view.