Zollverein Shaft XII — A Factory for Coal
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Transcript
Shaft XII opened in 1932 as one of the most modern coal-mining installations in the world. Its famous twin headframe and rigorously organised buildings were designed for efficiency, but also with an architectural discipline associated with modernism. This was industry presented as a complete system.
Coal arrived from underground and moved through sorting, processing and transport in an almost choreographed sequence. Thousands of workers depended on that system, while the Ruhr’s steelworks and power plants depended on the coal. Zollverein closed as a mine in 1986. Its survival allows us to see something mines usually erase when they stop operating: the physical logic of extraction.