essen, zeche zollverein

Vast defunct coal-mining complexes litter the Ruhr regional landscape. One of the most substantial is Zeche Zollverein, the 2001 recipient of a UNESCO World Heritage Site designation and a flagship for industrial re-use strategies. These images show the former coke processing plant, largely unsanitized but for a small out-building to one end. The plant is a mammoth exemplar of muscular machine aesthetic and calibrated volumetric drama. The image to the right, taken from the out-building cafe, peers out down a thin pond between widely spaced rails; these are the tracks along which the indecipherable apparatus in the center image used to trundle. In the winter, the pond serves as an ice-skating rink. The image to the left returns to the steel-frame-and-brick-infill model that marks most of the rest of the Zeche Zollverein complex, replete with absurd proportions and diagonal connection corridors perched upon spindly canted struts.