From 11-13 September, 2019 lovers of big industrial machinery gathered at Katowice in Poland for the sixth Big Stuff conference. With the theme “Preserving large industrial objects in a changing environment”, the conference addressed the future of large scale industrial heritage in the face of a rapidly changing environment, where social relations, architectural and urban design, landscape environments, mobility infrastructures and spatial functions are all being transformed, and where climate change adds another unknown to the preservation of historic buildings and machinery.
A selection of the presentations are available below, including 10 presentations that were published in the journal Architectus and are reproduced here by the kind permission of the Editors. Architectus is open access and the issue containing the Big Stuff 2019 papers can be found here.
Conference Papers and Presentations
Graça Filipe – The safeguarding of the Vale de Milhaços Gunpowder Factory and the operational conservation of the steam generator and the steam engine
Piotr Gerber – Comments on the protection of historic industrial facilities, experience in Silesia
Mateusz Grabowski, Bartosz M. Walczak – Old power stations as industrial heritage and adaptive re-use challenges
Agnieszka Gryglewska – Between tenement buildings and blocks of flats: Architecture of buildings of civil servants’ housing cooperatives in Wrocław at the beginning of the 20th century
Sandra Kaiser – The Augsburg Water Management System
Aleksandra Kozaczek, Gabriela Wojciechowska, Maria Czarnecka, Agnieszka Nowicka – Reconstruction and possibilities for adaptive re-use of railway stations based on the example of selected objects from the area of Lower Silesia – results of analyses carried out during student workshops
Jakub Lewicki – Preservation of historical monuments in Mazovia in the face of new challenges and changes in conservation theory
Björn Lindberg – Preserving platforms – Industrial heritage or documented digital heritage?
Neil Myers – The protection of industrial movable cultural heritage and the role of volunteer organisations in Australia
Pieter Neirinckx, Marc Pinte – Urban development in Ghent offers new opportunities for industrial heritage and the museum
Heike Overmann – How to conserve and develop industrial heritage sites as sites of heritage and innovation?
Glenn Rigden, Andy Munns – Restoration of the Steam Ship John Oxley
Ellie Swinbank – Collecting and displaying the decommissioning of North Sea Oil and Gas at the National Museums Scotland
Alison Wain – Big Stuff – preserving large machinery as part of our built environment
