Place-Based Processing: Industrial Process Architecture for Sumptuous Convivialities: Fid-Bau Portal

Place-Based Processing: Industrial Process Architecture for Sumptuous Convivialities

Kantrowitz, Sarah

Today, technologies of the emerging bioeconomy present one focused opportunity to unwind and transmute industrial operations into sustainable, regenerative work. Relying on standing industrial process design methods, however, may tether this hope to the same consequences and disparities industrialization has already suffered us the last few centuries. Instead, process design methods reconsidered to begin from specificity of place and reverence for relationship may be a helpful balance to methods that begin from abstract process operations or intended product outcomes, alone. This essay posits that drawing architects deeper into the pragmatics of designing and delivering factories, refineries, waste/energy plants, or other industrial infrastructure might support the above re-tooling of process design methods toward kind, non-modern practice. Process architecture is an established professional capacity for working spatially and relationally on plant design in collaboration with process engineering, though it is often practiced more by former plant operators than by architects. When included, the role of Process Architect can also be technically well-positioned within standing project delivery structures to help identify and implement better designs for the substantial footprint this building type has in ecological relationship, carbon emissions, material and waste flows, worker’s rights, concentration of capital, and patterns of land use and urbanization. To invite more architects to this seat at the table, this essay offers a very basic introduction (for architects) to the roles of process architecture and process engineering in industrial operations today and to how these disciplines might support a deeper sustainability in the near future. With a stronger coalition of architects working in skillful partnership with the vast webs of human and non-human assemblages shaping today’s industrial landscape, perhaps together we may help re-weave some of today’s most barren and extractive industrial practices into thriving, mutually nourishing convivialities.