We’ve seen abandoned malls and shopping centers transformed into some pretty cool things, including affordable micro housing and homeless shelters. In China, as a booming e-commerce market starts to drive many traditional brick-and-mortar markets out of business, architects are finding another new use for the massive structures: as offices for the country’s many new startups and entrepreneurs.

One such project is a co-working space called SOHO2 3Q by AIM Architecture. SOHO is a Chinese commercial building developer, and its 3Q brand is a co-working platform that Forbes called “Uber for offices.” Catering to a large number of small and medium-sized companies that prefer to rent office space by the week, month or six-year period instead of signing longer-term leases, 3Q has opened about 30 spaces around the country, many of them built for the purpose (including Wangjing SOHO by Zaha Hadid Architects.)

But SOHO realized that with 25,000 square meters of blank space (about 269,000 square feet), a disused shopping mall might be just what they need.

“The first consideration was approach. AIM decided it had to be bold. Strong colours and strong patterns would add life to the often-drab mall (and do double-duty as way finding). The space would be used by ambitious entrepreneurs, start-ups and companies not tied to old models. Bosses looking for more than a corner window in a glass tower. In one way, the project reflected us: it was not conventional. Re-programming a retail space brought up questions of the use of space in our cities, how interaction works and how to foster communities. This generation of workers was not content with a cubicle. A moot point, really, as filling the massive space would have required all of the cubicles in Beijing. AIM would have to turn that thinking on its side.”

“From this perspective, the constraints of the existing retail design became opportunities: where a shopping centre would say hallway, AIM could say island, a natural place to meet while using the home-style kitchens or sitting at the communal table. This was a greater challenge with two massive atriums, which carried in daylight but presented their own problems: how to maintain the peace of the open space but make it useful to 3Q’s community of companies?”

“The answer was in an oversized oak staircase, spilling down from the entrance into the basement floor. The slope of the stairs frames the space as a venue for lectures or events, transforming an area meant for personal consumption into one meant for community development. A second atrium allowed AIM to re-imagine the built world as a natural community, quite literally. In The Park, the great expanse comes back down to the human scale, with stands of live bamboo and glass meeting rooms that evoke backyard conservatories.”

AIM says the project ultimately feels like a “neighborhood” of companies and individual entrepreneurs, relating to each other or retreating to do business within public and private areas and creating organic networks.

An idea like this could work even in malls that are still in use, since the top floor is often the first to be abandoned when tenancy is low. That puts workers up near skylights, away from the bustle of shoppers but still within reach of restaurants and businesses.

Architecture that clings to cliff faces may not be the most practical or environmentally sensitive, but it sure is visually striking. A new proposal from Turkish designer and architect Hayri Atak takes the drama up a few notches with a vertigo-inducing cantilevered platform that juts out from the rock, complete with a glass-bottomed infinity pool.

The Cliff Concept Hotel is designed with Norways’ famous cliff Preikestolen in mind, overlooking the beautiful Lysefjorden body of water below. The lookout point itself resembles a pulpit, hence its name, and is the most popular tourist attraction in the Ryfylke area. Atak imagines the rock transforming into a boutique hotel with oval balconies, the rooms presumably carved into the rock beneath the plateau.

It would certainly offer a unique tourist experience, especially for those brave enough to venture out into the tip of the swimming pool, and the design itself is an intriguing one. However, it’s probably safe to say that people who like to visit the rock wouldn’t exactly appreciate it being taken over as a for-profit venture exclusively catering to deep-pocketed travelers, and would prefer to leave it as it is.

As fantasy architecture, or perhaps a project for another location, it’s pretty cool, and a great way for a young architect to call global attention to himself and his work. Hayri Atak is a graduate of Istanbul Technical University, Auburn University and the Nuova Academia di Belle Arti in Milan, and his projects include parametric pavilions and facades, retail and restaurant interiors and other hotel designs.

The newest of China’s surreal mirrored bookstores is now open in Chongqing, offering a disorienting, Escher-like experience to all who enter. Designed by X+Living, the Chongqing Zhongshuge Bookstore leads visitors through an unassuming glass facade on the third floor of Zodi Plaza and into a reflective maze full of reading materials waiting to be discovered.

Within the lobby is an arrangement of lampshade-shaped bookshelves that curve around illuminated reading spaces, their mirror images on the ceiling making them look much taller than they really are. “The bookshelves reflect on the ground and form a tunnel of books that beckons visitors to follow it deeper into space and knowledge,” says X+Living.

Further down the hallway, a “ladder hall” offers three levels of bookshelves accessed by branching staircases. The mirrors make it difficult to tell where the real shelves end and the reflections begin, but the space would be marvelous even without them. An adjacent children’s room is brighter in color, but similarly disorienting.

“Up to the 4th floor from the ‘ladder hall”’is a leisure area, where visitors can enjoy the aroma of coffee or a taste of good tea and immerse themselves into a tranquil world of different stories by reading. The ‘lampshade-shaped bookshelves’ around create scattered booths at this area, in which visitors may gather with friends to have fun reading and enjoy their leisure time. Connected to the leisure area is the extensive reading hall, where works of great minds are listed and visitors are able to broaden their eyes and enrich their spiritual world.”

Previously, the same studio designed floor-to-ceiling curved and mirrored bookshelves at the Yangzhou Zhongshuge bookshop, creating the effect of a tunnel of books. Check it out here.

What looks like a post-apocalyptic scene of a building collapsing into the sea is actually Europe’s first underwater restaurant, and it’s officially open for business. Architecture firm Snøhetta has completed “Under,” an eatery set on the southernmost point of the Norwegian coastline, which doubles as a marine research center. Opening to diners on March 20th, “Under” gives visitors views of a unique habitat for sea life from the submerged half of a tilted 34-meter-long (112 feet) monolithic volume.

The rough texture of the building’s concrete shell is designed to act as an artificial reef, inviting kelp, limpets and other sea creatures to take up residence. Snøhetta imagines it as a sunken periscope peering beneath waters that can be brackish and mysterious from above. The restaurant offers a serene contrast to the intense weather conditions of Lindesnes. As you pass from the bright surface down into the dining room, the feel of the space shifts, plunging you into deep blue-greens.

“Under is a natural progression of our experimentation with boundaries, says Snøhetta Founder and Architect, Kjetil Trædal Thorsen. “As a new landmark for Southern Norway, Under proposes unexpected combinations of pronouns and prepositions, and challenges what determines a person’s physical placement in their environment. In this building, you may find yourself under water, over the seabed, between land and sea. This will offer you new perspectives and ways of seeing the world, both beyond and beneath the waterline”.

The name “Under” has a double meaning, since in Norwegian, the word can be translated to “wonder.” Accommodating 30 to 40 diners each night, the restaurant offers menus focused on locally sourced produce and sustainable wildlife along with an educational experience about the biodiversity of the area.

“An equally important part of the project is the building’s facilitation of marine research. The restaurant will welcome interdisciplinary research teams studying marine biology and fish behavior, through cameras and other measurement tools that are installed on and outside the facade of the restaurant. The researchers’ aim is to document the population, behavior and diversity of species that are living around the restaurant, through cameras and live observation. The goal of the research is to collect data that can be programmed into machine learning tools that monitor the population dynamics of key marine species on a regular basis, thereby creating new opportunities to improve official marine resource management.”

Recycled architecture is more than just novelty structures and offbeat buildings made from bottles, cans and tires – though those can be pretty cool in their own right. It’s a way to put recycled materials to use on a large scale, reduce the tremendous amount of waste typically produced during construction and stimulate creativity. In fact, the challenge of seeing salvaged and recycled materials in a new way can help break up monotonous architectural norms, even when applied to major modern projects like community centers and museums.

The act of repurposing reclaimed materials often becomes part of the aesthetic, a conscious choice to highlight the building’s sustainability factor or just raise awareness about the potential of items like shipping containers. But sometimes, you can’t tell by a glance. Materials like reclaimed tiles, recycled concrete, salvaged wood and innovative new synthetics made of waste products enable a little more subtlety and elegance.

Modern architecture made of recycled materials can help raise the profile of greener approaches to building, move the industry as a whole closer to closed-loop ideals and even preserve physical connections between past, present and future.

Carrying Pieces of the Past Into the Future

Set at the foot of China’s Taihang Mountains, rural Luotuowan village suffered from a period of decline as the country focused on expanding its urban centers, and the bulk of its structures became dilapidated. When the local government finally invested in a mass re-roofing project, many residents opted for an affordable contemporary concrete option. But making the whole village safer didn’t have to mean discarding the beautiful wooden beams from their old houses. LUO Studios, which specializes in sustainable architecture, took those old beams and transformed them into a low-cost, low-waste sculptural canopy inspired by the work of Buckminster Fuller, with the villagers assisting in the building process.The result creates a shaded gathering place for the community, and offers a reminder of Luotuowan’s past.

The stratified facade of the new SOS Children’s Villages Lavezzorio Community Center in Chicago calls to mind layers of rock and sediment beneath the surface of the earth, suggesting growth and the passage of time – but it’s also a physical reflection of the way in which the material was sourced. Studio Gang Architects used concrete aggregate waste from construction sites around the Chicago area as a major component of the building, pouring it from each source in turn to create a sort of anonymized visual record of change throughout the city. Artistic and symbolic, this choice adds to the beauty of the building, gives it a sense of enhanced identity and reduces waste all at once without shouting its recycled nature from across the street.

Though best known for his stunning timber structures, Japanese architect Kengo Kuma is deft at making smart use of other materials as well, as seen here in the China Academy of Arts’ Folk Museum. The complex in Hangzhou recycles the old roof tiles of local houses into its own sculptural terraced roof as well as a shade screen along some of the open walls. “Their sizes are all different, and that helps the architecture merge into the ground naturally,” says Kuma.

In Mexico City, Alonso de Garay Architects continue a local trend of transforming the remains of dilapidated old buildings into modern architecture with ‘Recycled Building,’ an apartment complex with 26 units. Noting that these structures were too damaged to use thanks to “decades of carelessness and decay,” the architects see the act of recycling them into a contemporary building as a sensitive process of renewal, albeit one the that has helped transform these areas into some of “the most expensive and desired” in the city, contributing to the displacement of lower income residents (which is not exactly sustainable.)

Finding Surprising Uses for Mundane Waste Materials

Visible soda cans, beer bottles and tires incorporated into buildings are most often associated with the quirky nature of “earthships,” a type of passive solar earth shelter made of natural and up cycled materials. Whimsical and sculptural, these thermally heated and cooled buildings are about as sustainable as contemporary architecture gets, but they aren’t for everyone (or every climate). That doesn’t mean architects can’t use some of the same recycling tricks for modern buildings, with results that have less of a handmade appearance.

Designer Hyunje Joo came up with an innovative facade for a building in South Korea made of repurposed plastic baskets, giving the old building a facelift that diffuses sunlight, adds privacy and can be dismantled and recycled when the structure is demolished. 1,500 of the semi-transparent baskets create a screened envelope around the building.

“The surface minimizes the separation between the inside and outside, as light and silhouettes beyond the space show through. Over the course of the day, changes show on the surface of the wall due to the diffusion and reflection of the material. The passage of time is more actively sensed from both inside and outside, as these light effects stimulate our senses.”

Can you guess what Shau Bandung architects used to create the pixelated facade on this Microlibrary in Kampung, Indonesia? Believe it or not, they’re ice cream containers.

“As the building is located in a tropical climate, we aimed to create a pleasant indoor climate without the use of air conditioning. Therefore, we looked  for available façade materials in the neighborhood that were cost efficient, could shade the interior, let daylight pass and enable enough cross ventilation. Initially, we found several small vendors selling used, white and translucent jerry cans. However, prior to construction the jerry cans were no longer available in the quantities we required. Instead, we found used plastic ice cream buckets that were being sold in bulk. This turned out for the better as they have a more positive image and are more stable when cutting the bottom open for cross ventilation.”

From afar, you might not even guess that there’s anything unusual about this office building in Shanghai. The unusual facade material chosen for ‘Can Cube’ doesn’t reveal itself until you get much closer. Archi-Union Architects used a system of used aluminum soda cans enclosed in an aluminum frame, explaining that up cycling the cans for a new purpose in their current form actually saves more energy and materials than sending them through the standard recycling process to reclaim the metal.

“Enclosing them in an aluminium frame keeps the structure light and easily adjustable by its occupants. Window-sash type sections within the façade provide the user with full control of sunlight/daylight in all seasons. The façade works alongside underground heating and cooling devices, rainwater filtration and solar energy systems, which all provide more efficiency and minimize the wastage of energy.”