In Newark, New Jersey, a large and deceptively nondescript building is redefining the Garden State, producing millions of pounds of food per year just outside of Manhattan. This 70,000 square foot facility has the equivalent yield of over 5 million square feet of traditional farmland. Inside, a year-round, closed-loop aeroponics system employs no pesticides and requires 95% less water than field farming. This branch of AeroFarms is not alone — it’s part of a food production revolution with projects ranging from at-home and in-store micro-farms to massive facilities set up in old factories and warehouses around the world.

Technically, vertical farming can be done outside, too, by stacking planters in natural sunlight, but indoor vertical farms offer a range of advantages. Inside, there are no seasons and specialized LED lights make it possible to grow plants continuously and cycle through various crops more easily. The controlled environment and standardization of these systems also makes automation easier. In Japan, approaches have gone predictably high-tech, with endeavors like the Vegetable Factory, which is operated entirely by robots.

Spatial containment makes recycling more efficient, mitigates spoilage and reduces the risk of diseases and pests spreading beyond a specific facility. Transportation costs and energy requirements are also reduced for farms that move into old factories and warehouses right in and around cities, putting them closer to consumers. Aeroponics in general also require less material input — mainly mist and air with minimal water and soil — leading to a lighter footprint.

What started in large and independent facilities has begun to spread into mainstream grocery stores and supermarkets, too. A few years back, Target started testing direct retail micro-farms, beginning with leafy greens before moving to tomatoes, peppers and more. Since these kinds of retail spaces are climate-controlled already for the sake of both shoppers and products, less added energy is required to maintain ideal conditions.

In Berlin, a company called INFARM recently partnered with local shops to provide similar in-store services, cutting down on farm-to-table distance right in the heart of a major European metropolis. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, vertical creepers, rice paddies and broccoli fields were integrated into the design of an otherwise Modern-looking office building, brightening up the place while also providing food for the employee cafeteria.

Taking vertical integration a step further, projects like the ReGen Villages aim to incorporate stacked farms directly into residential communities. It may sound impractical or even Utopian, but at its root the idea is relatively traditional: backyard gardens and community gardening are nothing new. Coupled with walkability and density, these kinds of green-centric towns have a lot in common with New Urbanist ideas that go back decades.

Still, it is generally wise to maintain a healthy skepticism when it comes to fresh green architectural trends and technologies and eye-catching renderings. Skyscrapers covered in greenery (or treescrapers), for instance, have proven to be popular but also problematic in practice (catchy conceptual earthscrapers, groundscrapers and sidescrapers, too, for that matter). Sometimes, more practical organic solutions are hiding in plain sight. Take wood, for instance, a historically popular green building material now finding new forms and reaching new heights in tall buildings around the world. Newer is not always better.

Some extreme vertical farming ideas may indeed prove to be far-fetched and unsustainable, but market movements suggest there is a future in these kinds of facilities and approaches. Investors are putting their money where people’s mouths are, buying up disused urban real estate and developing new indoor farming technologies. Already, vertical farming is a $2,000,000,000 industry and experts project it will grow as much as 30% per year over the next decade.

Vertical farms are of course not a complete solution to ongoing threats like climate change and mounting global food crises, but they do show promise — these endeavors are slowly breaking down urban and rural barriers, reconnecting cities with the food sources that sustain them and shortening that critical distance from farm to table.

How much potential lies within the bones of an old, run-down factory building, perhaps even one that’s been abandoned for decades on end? On the surface, sometimes it can seem like there’s no market to resell an industrial complex with such a specific purpose, especially if the rest of the neighborhood has long since moved on, transitioning into commercial and residential districts. But creative re-use can make the most of these large, open spaces full of steel and concrete.

Instead of just knocking them down and starting over, these factory renovation projects reduce waste and help preserve the history and character of industrial neighborhoods while shape-shifting into spectacular residences, offices, schools, museums and cultural centers.

Private Residences

When renovating an old industrial structure, perhaps the most dramatic shift comes in a transformation to a residence. Taking spaces that can feel cold, hard and out of scale and making them feel like a cozy home where people spend intimate time with their loved ones is no easy feat, but it all comes down to embracing the building’s existing qualities.

When New York studio Fogarty Finger converted a defunct New Jersey factory that once housed a workshop for Alexander Thomson & Sons Pattern Makers, they identified the features that made the structure feel unique, like the weathered timbers. The company made wooden forms that were then cast in metal for propellers, and the antique industrial details contrasting with softer materials gives us a sense of what the space felt like in its prime.

Reclaimed factories make ideal live/work spaces for creatives and small business owners. In Beijing, Office Project transformed a striking factory building into a home, studio and gallery for a calligraphy artist. The tall one-story structure gave them plenty of bright white space for the exhibition areas, and a new steel roof rises up on one end to accommodate new clerestory windows for lots of natural light.

Inserting new volumes within the larger factory building can be a cool way to subdivide the space, as seen at 5Lmeet no.88, a mixed-use space in Beijing containing restaurants, a bookstore, offices and apartments within a former abandoned soy sauce factory. DAGA Architects subverted the traditional Chinese courtyard with a “floating island” meeting space in the center of the largest room, which hovers over small, partially enclosed workspaces. The apartments are ultra-compact and feature a lot of transforming furniture to save space. 

Perhaps the best-known example of converting a factory into a residence is Ricardo Bofill’s private home in Spain. The architect found a disused cement factory in 1973 consisting of over 30 silos, massive machine rooms and subterranean galleries, and spent decades converting the ruins into a surrealist palace surrounded by lush greenery, leaving many of the original industrial elements in place for context.

Offices & Schools

Offices and schools are a natural fit with the proportions of these old buildings. In Denmark, MVRDV and COBE collaborated to turn a former concrete factory into the Roskilde Festival Folk High School campus, located near the site of the popular annual festival and representing the first new folk school in Denmark in 50 years.

“We saw an immense potential in creating a creative school with an instant ‘street creditability’ because the school would be placed within an existing building, an abandoned factory,” COBE founder Dan Stubbergaard told Dezeen. “This meant that the school would not become institutional as a new building might be experienced as.”

A 120-year-old steam plant and Brutalist office building has become the headquarters for medical company ProMedica in Ohio. Architecture firm HKS spearheaded the project as part of an effort to revitalize Toledo’s downtown area. Originally designed by architect Daniel Burnham, who’s also known for his role as chief architect of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the structure offered a dramatic, spacious, history-infused waterfront setting for the new ProMedica Headquarters campus. The steam plant was vacant for three decades before it was purchased by the company, and its interior now contains four stories of offices, communal spaces and an atrium.

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Former Factories Transformed Creative Reuse Of Industrial Structures

These closed and abandoned pet shops eerily echo with the long lost sights, sounds and smells (oh, those smells!) of what were effectively urban retail zoos.

Why Not Both?

It’s a pet shop, it’s a seafood store, it’s… both? It would appear so! Sure, Donna’s Aquatic Pet Shop and Lee’s Seafood Co., Inc may sport different signs but, as Flickr member Fuzzy Gerdes‘ horrified friend Erica reportedly and repeatedly shouted, “It’s the same phone number!” Our lead image of the fenced-over Chicago store(s) dates from April of 2008 while the second photo from Flickr member crowbert depicts a slightly more active scene from a couple of years previous.

Old Age of Aquaria

The hell is an “aquaria”? Also, shouldn’t that golden creature on the sign be a fish and not a bird? Looks like a “screaming chicken” from a Trans-Am’s hood ended up as roadkill and was painted over by a lane-line paint truck. So much for this broke-ass Bird of Paradise… Paradise Pets, to be exact. Flickr member Jon Southcoasting captured the closed not-quite-fish-or-fowl shop from Shoreham-by-Sea, UK, in April of 2014.

Reptile Needsssss

Much like a snake shedding its skin, Godiva Reptiles in Coventry, UK seems to be sloughing off its signage to reveal – no, not its final form – a previous incarnation as a video rental store. Unlike the apocryphal serpent, however, the sign’s piecemeal decomposition was a harbinger of things to come. According to photographer and Flickr member Hazel Nicholson, “As of May 2017 the shop has closed down and the former owner has been found guilty of trading without a licence.” Guess the most important “reptile need” is a license to trade in reptiles. Who knew?

Our Fur Feathers

According to photographer and Flickr member shrinkin’violet, “the number 9 in the telephone number on the signage is different from the rest. This was probably added after 1995 when Bristol received the new area code.” In related news, this rather bland “petfoods” (is that even a word?) shop in beautiful downtown Bristol, UK, managed to stay in business for well over 20 years. Still plenty of fur-lorn feathered customers (or freeloaders) hanging around outside the shop, though.

Zoohaus, Raus!

Sorry, Fur & Feathers, but the pet store longevity prize goes to the former Zoohaus-Altrock, a pet shop in Wiesbaden, Germany. From 1919 to 2011 – an incredible span of 92 years – Zoohaus-Altrock pet shop supplied the local Hessians with “erlebniswelt heimtiere” (“adventure world pets”) typified by the intrepid tuxedo kitty doing an adventurous spider-cat imitation just to the right of the sign. Flickr member Arjan Richter snapped the shop’s charming two-piece (three, including the cat) signage in March of 2011.

IAMS Abandoned

Ah, the pride of Pittsgrove Township… seriously, that is one sharp shop! From the outwardly-angled brickwork buttresses framing the store entrance to the snazzy Mid-century Modern eggcrate-grill window framing, this shop has got it all. Well, except for a tenant, of course. Flickr member Thomas captured this former Jersey store (near what appears to be a Jersey shore) in June of 2008.

Non-Starter

STOP me before I sell pets again… or buy POTS back from previous customers, whatever. Kudos to Flickr member Victor Reynolds for posting an explanation: it seems the store’s original name was “PET STOP” but once the store stopped selling pets, they removed the “PET” from the sign. You’ll find this abandoned pet shop in Pohatcong, New Jersey, where the photographer stopped to snap the sign in the summer of 2015.

In an age of mass extinctions and climate chaos, can we reverse-engineer some aspects of our built environments to live in greater harmony with nature? Many of our cities are built on former wetlands, fighting a losing battle with erosion and the sea. We’ve lined important ecological corridors with concrete. We’ve hunted into oblivion many of the very species that could help keep the rest of the food chain in check. Much of our architecture is focused on shutting ourselves away from nature, as if we could escape it. But advocates for ‘rewilding’ say all we have to do to repair some of the damage humanity has wrought upon the Earth is let go of our obsession with control.

The concept of rewilding has been around for decades, and it’s not necessarily a cohesive movement or concept, but rather a collection of related goals. Some define ‘rewilding’ specifically as the reintroduction of apex predators to certain regions, but just as often, it simply means allowing nature to take over far more often than we do. That might look like any number of things: removing sea walls and dams, reinstating river meanders, protecting certain marine sites from fishing and harvesting, allowing brownfield sites to grow wild after cleanup, making concrete channels more hospitable to wildlife or restoring floodplains.

Of course, we still have to build things. We need housing, agricultural fields, industry and transportation infrastructure. A metropolis like New York isn’t likely to pack up and move elsewhere in the face of rising seas anytime soon. But many cities around the world are already taking small steps toward rewilding, whether they define it that way or not.

Faux Riverbanks in Chicago

In Chicago, a nonprofit called Urban Rivers manages a project called The Wild Mile, which is in the process of transforming the manmade, steel-walled North Branch Canal of the Chicago River into a haven for wildlife. A few small sections are already complete, and by 2020, the canal will have wetlands, forest, walkways and kayak access points. The basis of the initiative is the creation of faux riverbanks anchored to the channel, made of coconut-fiber beds. The root systems reach into the water to filter and break down pollutants in this neglected section of the canal, and provide a place for mussels, birds and other species.

The Urban Wildlands of Dessau, Germany

The town of Dessau in Germany is shrinking. It never really recovered after its destruction at the end of World War II; it later became part of East Germany, its citizens mostly working in factories, but those industries ground to a halt when Germany was reunited in 1990. Many people left, and the residents left were mostly older. Before long, Dessau was essentially a ghost town, with wide swaths of empty parking lots and abandoned Communist housing blocks. The more it declined, the more people moved away. Instead of trying to lure people back in, the city’s government made an unusual decision: intentionally giving the land back to nature.

Many of the abandoned buildings were removed, and Dessau is in the process of buying up property along a nearly 300-acre belt that they hope to turn into a greenway – but they don’t have a lot of money for landscape design. Their solution mostly consists of wildflower meadows, which will grow into woodlands over time.

Restoring the Shoreline of New York City

Surrounded by water, with many sections built right on former swamplands, New York City will likely see the kind of flooding wrought by Hurricane Sandy more frequently in the near future. It was that particular disaster that prompted Rebuild by Design, a federally funded program that solicited shoreline restoration proposals from major architecture firms like Bjarke Ingels Group. While many of the other submissions focused on areas like Staten Island and Hoboken, New Jersey, BIG’s Dryline proposal essentially wraps the Manhattan shore in 10 continuous miles of green carpet acting as a high water barrier. This “protective park” incorporates parks, bike shelters, skateboard ramps, seating and pavilions.

BIG’s vision may be – well – big, but whether or not it’s ever really built, similar buffers are popping up on a smaller scale, like the recently completed Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park in Long Island City. Other projects managed by city governments are restoring beach dunes, removing intrusive infrastructure and restoring coastal habitats or constructing new wetlands to help anchor soil in place. The installation of vegetated islands floating offshore could help break waves and host wildlife at the same time.

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Urban Rewilding Reverse Engineering Cities To Save Nature And Ourselves

The owners of these feline-focused houses understand that humans don’t own cats – it’s the other way around. They commissioned interior designers and architects to build cat walkways, window nooks, climbing shelves and chic glass lounges right into the design of their homes, whether to boldly put their cats front-and-center or subtly take advantage of unused vertical space. These streamlined modern results prove you can craft a home that meets your pets’ needs without looking like you live in an animal shelter.

Built-In Cat Bedroom by INDOT

Taiwan-based studio INDOT gave a pair of cats a bedroom of their own with a modern glass enclosure full of wooden perches. The ‘floating’ box hangs within a recessed wall of the living room, giving the family a view of their pets. Wooden slats on two sides offer ventilation.

Built-In Bookcase for Cats by BFDO Architects

Barker Freeman Architects (BFDO) call this project “House for Booklovers and Cats,” and it’s easy to see why. “The clients, an artist/poet/professor and a poetry & literature library administrator, asked us to convert this Brooklyn rowhouse into a series of lively, light-filled spaces,” they say. “They also wanted the house to provide accommodations for their two shy but inquisitive cats – including ways for the cats to slip away from unexpected guests. The key feature of the reconfigured house is an airy parlor floor living space. The 20-by-50 foot room is bordered by bookshelves configured around cat circulation routes. Shelves project to create steps for the cats to climb up to a continuous open ledge where they can observe activities below.”

Loft H by ST Studio

The owner of this Taipei apartment included his two cats in the design scheme from the very beginning, asking ST Studio to keep their needs in mind, too. As a result, the design team transformed the two-bedroom apartment into an open-plan studio so the cats can freely roam, with plenty of natural light, plants and staggered shelving for them to play on. Note the subtle cat walkway that runs over the living room windows.

Inside Out by Takeshi Hosaka Architects

The entire premise of ‘Inside Out’ by Takeshi Hosaka Architects is that designing our homes around cats actually improves the quality of our own lives, too. What do indoor house cats want, after all? Lots of sunshine to lounge in, the feeling of being outside while also being safe, and plenty of nooks to investigate. Japanese studio Takeshi Hosaka enclosed the private core of the home within an outer envelope to create liminal spaces with access to fresh air and even rain. They wanted the experience of being in the house to feel like being outside.

House-Is by Do Do

Yet another ‘catwalk’ is incorporated right into the design of a home with Tokyo-based studio Do Do’s ‘House-Is’ project, a renovation for a graphic designer and his wife that adds built-in elements and workspace into a small house clad in black corrugated metal. The catwalk runs along the entirety of the first floor.

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High Feline Design 10 Modern Homes With Built In Cat Friendly Features