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

Without sacrificing any of its industrial charm, Dutch architects transformed an old train shed into a gorgeous library and community event space. “LocHal” is Tilburg’s “new public city forum,” says Civic Public Architecture, which completed the project alongside Braaksma & Roos Architects and interior design firm Inside Outside. Not only have they proven the extraordinary potential for reuse of such structures, they’ve infused life back into a disused zone of the city in the process.

Measuring nearly 50 feet tall on a footprint of roughly 60,000 square feet, the new library takes advantage of the preexisting glass walls and skylights while adding new structures to subdivide the interior space. Bookshelves, stairs and platforms made of oak, concrete and black steel give patrons plenty of space to wander, explore, discover new reading materials and attend meetings. The building also contains learning laboratories for community skill-sharing. Inside Outside designed the multi-story fabric curtains that help create porous zones within the enormous building, along with what they call the “stair landscape.”

“For 150 years Tilburg’s Spoorzone was the ultimate workshop of the Dutch Railway. Now a library and creative workplaces will be realized here in the former Locomotive Hall. The team of The Cloud Collective, renovation specialists Braaksma & Roos and Inside Outside has created an integrated spatial concept that connects inside and outside, the interior and the urban landscape. Located on the station square the new program represents itself as an inviting staircase – “a Forum” – inside these gigantic industrial halls. On the stair-landscape different scenarios can play simultaneously: a lecture, an exhibition, a workshop or quietly reading. The program of the Forum is conducted by three pairs of custom-woven curtains, hanging over the full height of the hall, which define temporary spaces for specific uses and thus allow the forum to remain open in its entirety.”

The architects chose not to repaint original elements like flaking steel pillars, simply adding newer, sleeker materials alongside them in a contrast between old and new that’s particularly striking in areas where greenery drapes down from balconies. The result is a fitting tribute to the neighborhood’s history that adapts beautifully to modern needs.

It’s not often that you can choose from dozens of cafes situated high above a crowded urban plaza, gazing out at the landscape from a table on the balcony, all for the price of a coffee. In Ho Chi Minh City, such views come cheap thanks to a highly unusual reuse project transforming a 1960s apartment complex into a sort of vertical food court. Set along the city’s pedestrian street, 42 Nguyen Hue finds a new purpose for a formerly abandoned concrete building that’s no longer well suited for habitation, inviting passersby to come up and explore.

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After passing through the ground-floor motorbike parking lot, you’ll be charged VND 3,000 (about thirteen U.S. cents) to use the elevator, which is refundable if you make a purchase at any of the places above. Then, navigate floor after floor of cafes, boutiques and jewelry shops, taking a moment to look outside each time. There’s Vietnamese cuisine, of course, but also sushi, Hawaiian poke and more.

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In the ‘60s, the building was a hip new place for important people to live, and its residents included government officials like the first secretary of the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington, according to Asia Life Magazine. People who can recall living or growing up there are often amused to learn what their old apartments have become. The interior layouts are much the same as they used to be, but the interiors are often divided between several businesses, with the living rooms offering prime spots with balcony access.

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The particular mix of cafes and shops at 42 Nguyen Hue is meant to appeal to millennials, and if Instagram is any indication, it’s working. The apartments are all over the #nguyenhue and #nguyenhuestreet tags. Given its condition, particularly compared to the gleaming buildings adjacent to it, it’s hard to say how much longer this experiment will last, but it’s a cool idea that could easily transfer to other vacant buildings in big, busy cities. You can find a guide to the building at Vietnam Coracle.

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Few of us make plans for our lives with our own deaths in mind, so perhaps it’s not surprising that architects don’t usually spend much of the design process thinking about the virtually inevitable demolition of their creations. It might seem as morbid and premature as college graduates making plans for their own funerals, but considering the entire life cycle of a structure before it’s even built could have a massive impact on the amount of waste we generate – and help us adapt to the uncertain conditions of the future.

Though some buildings and infrastructure may stand for many hundreds of years, the vast majority of it is rendered obsolete in a matter of decades. Practical needs and aesthetic preferences change, and materials wear down. Currently, about 80% of all materials and minerals in circulation in the U.S. economy are consumed by the construction industry, and about 70% of construction waste is concrete.

In 2010, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency determined that an estimated 104 million tons of materials were sent to landfills from project sites around the country, and 92% of that waste came from demolitions and renovations. Construction debris often contains lead, asbestos, mercury, arsenic and other hazardous substances, and modern composite materials aren’t necessarily much better for human health and the environment.

In the United States, where the average life span of highway bridges is about 70 years and the majority of bridges currently in use were built in 1945, we’re in dire need of a refresh, but all those crumbling structures will have to go somewhere. When the old east span of the Bay Bridge in Oakland, California was replaced, Caltrans took care to dismantle it so some parts could be reused in creative new ways, but the project still produced tons of lead-contaminated hazardous materials that were then sent to a landfill. What if the bridge – and others like it – had been designed with components that could easily be dismantled and reused for other projects?

A movement called Design for Deconstruction (DfD), sometimes called Design for Disassembly, proposes the research and development of new structural system concepts that facilitate truly sustainable construction through the assessment of a project’s entire life cycle. That means there’s a way to reuse or recycle every component of a structure using existing recycling streams. Spearheaded by architect and building scientist Bradley Guy, DfD offers a collection of design principles that aim for prefabrication, pre-assembly and modular construction, simplified connection details and building systems, minimized parts and materials, ease of disassembly, flexibility and adaptability, the use of reusable materials and considerations for worker safety.

Design for Deconstruction was first defined in the 1990s, but the general concept has existed for much longer. The Crystal Palace at Sydenham is an early example, built in Hyde Park, London to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. Made of cast iron and plate glass, the 990,000-square-foot building with an interior height of 128 feet was designed to be temporary, simple, cheap and easy to transport. Its modular panels were packed up and moved to South London for reassembly, and it remained there until its destruction by fire in 1936.

One of the most important factors in DfD is the longevity of the materials. There are lots of temporary structures out there, built to be disassembled and transported, but few of them are designed to last, and they rarely even come close to approaching the scale of The Crystal Palace. Equally crucial is follow-through, as proven by a recent project in Brazil. Like most structures built for the Olympic Games, the Rio 2016 Olympic Handball Arena was a prime candidate for experimental methods of reuse. At the start of the project, Brazil’s economy was booming, but by 2014, the country was in the grips of a recession. Plans to dismantle the Arena and transform it into four primary schools never came to fruition, and now it’s rotting along with the rest of the city’s Olympic structures – the very fate its architects hoped to avoid.

But when it’s done right, Design for Deconstruction has the potential to revolutionize the future of architecture. Closed-loop construction systems don’t just have a lower ecological footprint, they encourage innovation and produce unique aesthetics. Two houses by architecture firm Kieran Timberlake give us a glimpse of what this could look like. Loblolly House, built in 2006, takes inspiration from treehouses in its design and construction, with pre-built modules and “cartridges” that connect with simple hand tools. Cellophane House was assembled like a car, with the entire construction process broken down into integrated assemblies that were constructed off site, delivered by trailers and stacked with a crane. It was built for exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

“Materials were selected to be lightweight, minimizing embodied energy, and reusable within existing recycling streams. The same aluminum frame used for Loblolly House was scaled up from two stories to five, enabled by a strengthening system of custom-designed steel connectors. The SmartWrap skin was attached to that frame, with interior floors, ceilings, and partitions made of structural plastic. The skin was envisioned as a filter, selectively letting in daylight and seasonal heat and keeping out UV light and hot or cold air, depending on the season.”

“The final experiment at MoMA was its disassembly. The house was deglazed, un-stacked, and disassembled at ground level using basic handheld tools. Parts were organized on pallets and removed from the site in two days. Virtually no waste was generated, and 100 percent of the energy embodied in materials was recovered. The only remnant was a patch of gravel in an asphalt lot.”

Other recent examples include Kengo Kuma’s Jenga-like Cafe Kureon, the Pop-Up House by Multipod Studio and ‘A Simple Factory Building’ by Pencil Office, which features a pollution-filtering facade, aluminum window walls and reinforced concrete construction designed to be fully recycled at the end of its 33-year lease period.

Iranian architect Mahshid Fadaei’s ‘Design for Deconstruction Housing for Working Class’ envisions an 800-unit complex set within a fully recyclable frame that uses easily replaced modular housing pods connecting to each other with a non-rigid plug-and-play system. While shipping containers are an obvious choice for this sort of system, they have some constraints that make them less than ideal in certain applications, making purpose-built pods an attractive option.

Architect William McDonough, champion of ‘Cradle to Cradle design’ – which considers the full lifecycle of consumer products – integrates his drive for smart sustainability into his own projects. His firm completed the NASA Sustainability Base (pictured top), a 50,000-square-foot, lunar-shaped complex housing 200 staff designed with a plan for how every last component will be dealt with at the end of the building’s life (which is, McDonough notes, probably far into the future.)

Since Design for Deconstruction is still in its youth, we’ve yet to see many real-life examples of its end game in action. But as climate change and other factors call the conditions of the next century into question, architecture that’s made to be as adaptable, versatile and reusable as possible could help us weather whatever is to come, and finding a way to reign in our burgeoning landfills is a no-brainer.

With the age of big box stores waning, all those massive abandoned retail facilities could be transformed almost instantly into housing for the homeless using a variety of plug-and-play prefab elements. The research and development studio at KTGY Architecture + Planning in Los Angeles considers what we seem to need space for the most in cities – housing people who tend to fall through the cracks as the cost of living continues to increase – and builds entire complexes of supportive spaces and services within the empty shells of stores like Sears and JCPenney.

“Re-Habit” doesn’t get rid of retail altogether. It just makes the shopping portions of each building smaller, and places bedroom pods, restrooms, kitchens, dining halls, offices, job training rooms and other spaces behind them. Each Re-Habit store would be a community-supported thrift boutique benefiting the transitional housing program.

The main goal of the project is to be self-supporting, the creators explain, by providing training, employment and housing for residents, who rotate chores like working in the kitchen or keeping the dining hall clean. The large, flat roofs of big box stores are ideal for rooftop gardening, recreation and solar panels, and many have outdoor plaza areas that could accommodate small pop-up shops and food carts.

To demonstrate how it could work, KTGY used a typical 86,000-square-foot store (which would often be an “anchor store” in a shopping plaza) and created illustrations showing how it could be used. The firm designed modular led pot units that contain anywhere from 2 to 20 beds, easily slotting into the large, empty spaces. Additionally, the space could support 8 individual apartment units on an upper floor.

“From 2016 to 2017, the homeless population in the U.S. increased for the first time in seven years, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In the U.S., 553,742 people were homeless in 2017. Housing programs are a meaningful contribution to addressing the homelessness crisis.”

“Living without a home not only endangers individuals’ health and safety, but is also a significant barrier to obtaining and keeping a means of employment. Shelter is a necessity for all, and providing housing is one way to ease suffering and support individuals seeking to break a cycle of poverty.”