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.

A series of disused railway arches in London have become surprisingly cozy interior spaces with the addition of modular wooden systems that fit together like puzzles. Architecture firm Boano Prišmontas has developed a kit of parts that can be quickly and easily deployed in a variety of similar spaces, working with developers and local governments to make those spaces valuable to the community once more.

“The Arches Project” uses dry-joint techniques to infill abandoned “pocket spaces” around the UK, including undercrofts and multi-story car parks as well as the arches beneath railroad lines. The firm says its value lies in its “nomadic, temporary and sustainable approach.” The company that owns the railroad already rents out these spaces to pop-up shops and other businesses, but provides nothing but some neon lights and corrugated plastic lining, which doesn’t improve the thermal quality of the space, and only allows certified installers to fix the lining onto the listed brick vaults.

“Boano Prišmontas worked around this constraint to design a freestanding self-buildable plug-in space, a room-within-a-room that is built by expanding its shape as much as possible to infill the vault of an arch.

The digitally fabricated structural system is comprised of two elements:

1. The boxes. Modular CNC-cut plywood units that are repeated to infill the space as much as possible and stacked on walls to support the beams as well as the external polycarbonate cladding.

2. The beams. Modular CNC-cut plywood pieces joined together to cover a maximum span of 7.2m. They are the support onto which the insulation sheet is clipped on.

The boxes are sized to host the polycarbonate facade, which allows to fill the internal space with natural light. The polycarbonate panels also spill light on the street showing a glimpse of the activity taking place inside the space.”

Made entirely of certified birch plywood sheets, the puzzle pieces are CNC cut to minimize material wastage and ensure a perfect fit. Every component, including the facade cladding and insulation sheet, is made to be re-deployed when dismantled (a basic tenet of the Designed for Disassembly movement.)

“The railway arches are a unique urban asset as they host all sorts of retail activities and productive spaces such as studios, laboratories, workshops, mechanics, shops, micro breweries, and coworking spaces to name just a few. Railway arches are the backbone of the ‘productive London’. The Arches Project aims to preserve and promote the diversity of uses by quickly creating a spacious, warm and dry space that delivers affordable workspace for local businesses.”

Overall, this is a pretty cool example of making better use of available urban space in a way that produces very little waste. Ideally, there would also be some serious consideration given to how the project impacts its surrounding community, including whether poor and unhoused people are able to take part in it and whether the installations promote gentrification, potentially having a negative future impact on affordability in the area. Projects that don’t consider social impacts simply aren’t sustainable.

There’s something about the contrast of opulent ornamentation and expensive materials with rot and deterioration that makes luxury resorts and mansions some of the most fascinating abandonments. Someone once cared about these places so much, they invested untold sums of money and hours of labor into them, perhaps having their walls hand-painted with frescoes or calling in master craftspeople to apply the finishing touches.

But nothing lasts forever, and neglect has the same effect on high end structures as it does on those more humble. Different viewers may look at them with sadness or schadenfreude, thinking about the larger context of human impermanence or just the potential wasted, but either way, we can’t help but look.

For many people, those feelings came into play this week as photos emerged of an eerie abandoned complex of castle-like mansions in Turkey. About halfway complete, the $200 million complex of fake chateaus modeled after historic European architecture is in limbo after economic uncertainty led large numbers of buyers and investors to pull out of the project. The developers don’t have enough funds to keep going, and though they say they’ll find a way to move the Burj al Babas development forward by the end of the year, it’s unclear whether that will actually happen.

Mocking commenters across the internet note not only the Disney-like quality of the $400,000 houses but how closely spaced they are. Row after row of identical Cinderella McMansions swirl through the valley, all sitting empty, many with gaping maws where their doors and windows should be. But while this is a particularly eye-catching example of stalled luxury development, it’s never been occupied, leaving it empty in another sense. The ghostly echoes of the lives that were lived in abandoned places, the hopes and dreams that their remains represent, are what lend them emotional weight.

Echoes of Past Promise

French photographer Thomas Jorion captures this particular quality of abandoned mansions and palaces throughout Italy in his series “Veduta,” which is on display at Esther Woerdehoff Galerie in Paris through April 6, 2019.

Each photograph depicts a real mansion – not a facsimile of one – still decked out in traditional Italian finery despite its considerably lowered circumstances. There are no background stories given for what happened to these beautiful villas, why they’ve fallen into disrepair; it could be that the cost of restoration is too high for most buyers, or the locations are inconvenient, or any number of other things. These places feel frozen in time, records of an era that has passed or perhaps an empire in the midst of falling.

Belgium seems to be brimming with abandoned castles, perhaps due to the simple fact that the country is full of historic architecture that’s difficult and expensive to maintain. Château Miranda, also known as Château de Noisy, stood as a stunning example of ornate abandonments before its demolition in 2017.

The 19th-century neo-Gothic castle in Celles was occupied by German forces during World War II and later became an orphanage and a “holiday camp for sickly children” before it was abandoned in 1991. Mesen Castle in Lede has a similar story. Purchased by a Catholic institution after the noble family that commissioned it died out, it became a boarding school for girls before its abandonment in 1970. It was destroyed in 2011.

North America has some abandoned castle-like structures of its own, including a once-beautiful mansion that now looks like the perfect setting for Netflix’s next gothic horror series. The villa on Carleton Island in Cape Vincent, New York has been unoccupied for over 70 years, and it has deteriorated to the point of serious safety concerns.

Businessman William O. Wyckoff commissioned the mansion in 1890 and promptly died of a heart attack on his first night there; his wife had passed away a month prior. Though the house was passed on to his sons, the family seems to have lost its fortune during the Great Depression, and the property was abandoned. The current owners live in a nearby cottage, putting it on the market every few years with no luck. One potential buyer estimated that it would cost up to $12 million to rebuild.

Remains of Wasted Wealth

Built in 1963, Japan’s Hachijo Royal Hotel quickly became a popular destination for wealthy Japanese natives looking for a quick and easy weekend getaway. At the time, passports were hard to acquire, keeping a lot of travel limited to domestic destinations. Set on a volcanic island just a short ferry ride from the mainland, the hotel offered luxe accommodations in a beautiful hillside setting the Japanese government promoted as “The Hawaii of Japan.”

But as soon as international travel became more accessible, Japanese tourists began leaving the country for new adventures, and the hotel languished. It was abruptly abandoned in 2006, and the ensuing years have been brutal. Nearly everything remains exactly as it was then: towels draped over the edges of the tubs, toys in the play rooms, offices full of outdated electronics. Many of the rooms have been invaded by ferns and moss.

Known for its constant frenzy of construction, innovation and over-the-top spending, Dubai has its fair share of arrested developments. But one of the weirder displays of seemingly casual extravagance is the country’s high number of abandoned luxury vehicles. Some of the world’s most expensive cars are little more than street litter here, collecting dust curbside or in parking garages.

But this particular millionaire habit isn’t quite as it appears. Though some might truly be cast aside by owners too rich to care, many are abandoned by owners who bought them during a boom but can no longer afford them. In Dubai, bouncing a check or failing to pay back debt is a criminal offense, so it’s likely that formerly wealthy expats dumped the cars and then high-tailed it back home.

Back in Belgium, urban explorers hit the motherlode when they entered the grounds of the Kasteel van Heers a 13th century castle near Brussels that fell into decay when the descendants of its original owners couldn’t afford to maintain it.

The castle and all its contents were seized by the Flemish government in 2007, but somehow they missed a collection of six 1060s Alfa Romeo sports cars held within a dusty basement – including a rare and extra-valuable prototype. They were all sold at auction in 2015. Kind of makes you wonder what else dusty castles around the world might be hiding, doesn’t it?

If all of this waste makes you wish you could save an abandoned mansion, the governments of several countries would like to assist you with that venture. Italy is giving away over 100 historic castles and villas for free as long as the new owners can produce concrete plans for renovating the sites to help boost tourism to their local villages, and rural Japanese towns are so desperate for residents they’re giving away abandoned houses. In France, you can “adopt a chateau” without becoming solely responsible for its upkeep through a collective effort to preserve neglected structures with historic value.

The concept renderings for this wildly unusual hotel design in an abandoned Chinese quarry debuted on the internet over a decade ago, and now the finished complex is welcoming guests. The InterContinental Shimao Wonderland is the “world’s first underwater quarry hotel” set into the cliff faces of the 288-foot-deep former quarry, with the lowest two floors descending beneath the surface and the highest two poking out above ground level. Designed by London- and Shanghai-based architect Martin Jochman of Atkins in 2006, who later brought the project to his own firm Jade + QA, the hotel is described as a “groundscraper.”

Jochman says his design takes inspiration from the site itself – its shape, its unusual nature and the potential it still had after decades of disuse. The structure follows the contours of the cliff faces and features a glass central circulation atrium full of elevators and staircases that mimics the look of a waterfall cascading down to the pool below. Inside, the 16-story hotel contains 337 guest rooms, a large conference center, a spa, an underwater restaurant and water-based leisure facilities; visitors who aren’t staying overnight can enjoy a range of adventurous activities in the outdoor entertainment park as well as the cantilevered glass walkway extending over the water.

The convex and concave guest wings on either side of the “Glass Waterfall” are described as “Hanging Gardens,” and the underwater areas are called “The Lagoon.” These elements are intended to seamlessly segue into the rocky cliff faces on either side. Jochman hopes the hotel will not only become a landmark, but also an extension of the rugged landscape itself.

“Apart from minimising the impact of this building on the local environment by its orientation and adopting low profile with only 2 floor levels above the ground, the mainly passive sustainable features will take advantage of the orientation, low profile, grass roof minimising the impact of North wind and providing biodiversity. The unique microclimate caused by the thermal properties of the quarry rock mass and the quarry lake, cooling the structure in the summer and heating in the winter will also have positive effect on the energy consumption of the hotel.”

“This successful ‘Brownfield’ site recycling (or even up-Cycling) by utilisation of a disused industrial quarry site and giving it new purpose will make this project important contribution to the principles of sustainability in China and around the world giving an example how difficult industrial sites can be given new lease of life.”

The hotel cost $555 million to complete, and suites start at $4,270 per night. Jade + QA is also responsible for the super-tall Burj Al Arab in Dubai.

Photography by Blakstation & Kevin 

There’s something extra eerie about places that are not quite abandoned just yet, but edging closer and closer to a prolonged death process. Relics of another time, these architectural remnants feel like physical connections to all the lives that passed through them, many of which have already met an end. Lacking any efforts to preserve or revive them, they slowly crumble, waiting for their inevitable demolition. Photographer Michael Eastman specializes in capturing such places on film in all their deteriorating glory.

“These empty rooms are really portraits of the people that inhabited them,” says Eastman. “It’s for us as the viewer to figure out from the arrangement of the furniture, the things on the walls, the kinds of things that they’ve chosen to surround themselves with, the condition of the house, to kind of build our own portrait of who that is.”

The self-taught photographer has spent five decades documenting interiors and facades in cities like Rome, Paris, Havana and New Orleans – all of which happen to have similar qualities in terms of color, character and a rich sense of history. Chromogenic 4×5-inch film, a wide-angle lens and long exposure times allow Eastman to reproduce the vivid hues in each scene without the use of artificial light, resulting in painterly compositions that feel like you could step right into them.

A selection of Eastman’s photographs are currently on display at the JL Modern Gallery in Palm Beach, Florida through February 23rd.

“In a historical sense, Michael Eastman’s work arises from a history of photographers renowned for their preservation of culture. Many of the buildings pictured will cease to exist; whether crumbling Beaux Arts or Colonial structures or ones that have become subsequently removed or renovated, Eastman’s work in Lisbon, Buenos Aires, and especially Havana, present an intimate yet distant portrait of a place and its history,” says JL Modern Gallery of the show.

“Eastman’s contemporary photographs are in the tradition of Atget’s preservation of Paris, Walker-Evans documentation of the American South, and Berenice Abbott’s “Changing Times of New York” project. The images activate an explorative quest that the viewer can enter to understand the history of the human experience of the past.”

“Michael Eastman’s grand photographs appeal to a myriad of collectors for many reasons. Most importantly, they resonate with the uniqueness that our collective lives have made on transforming both the places we live and interact in as well as the furniture and personal effects that are products of our civilization. The photographs, steeped in nostalgia and a time gone by, are remnants and evidence of the continuity of our collective lives.”

Check out WebUrbanist’s 2010 interview with Eastman on his striking series, “Vanishing America.”