FERRUM

A temporary pavilion stands in a park at the foot of a disused blast furnace, in a town whose identity was shaped for decades by steelmaking. The furnaces changed the landscape, governed how the town grew and set the rhythm of daily life, and their mark remains in its buildings and in the memory of the people who lived beside them. The pavilion won the fifth edition of an urban architecture festival devoted this year to the role of energy in shaping cities.

Steel is the pavilion’s subject as well as its structure. A galvanised circular roof fifteen metres across, light and demountable, sits next to the old furnace and speaks directly to it. Beneath it, reused steel plates, light frames and parts taken from industry take on a temporary new role. Even the ground takes part: small mounds of slag recall the old rail lines and mark where a second furnace, now gone, once stood.

The elements come from different stages of the steel production cycle, and the pavilion is designed to be taken down after the festival so that its materials return to that same cycle. An industry long tied to pollution and the intensive extraction of resources appears instead as a source of material that can be recovered, reused and transformed, with the waste of steel production made visible as part of the present landscape.

For a few weeks, pieces of industrial infrastructure become a space open to the town. Where production and labour once dominated, the pavilion offers a place to meet, stay and share activities, setting up a dialogue between the town’s industrial past and its present.