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

TV factories once churned out countless cathode ray tube television sets but when the Golden Age of Television faded to black, the TV factories followed.

You have to look for the abandoned factory in our lead image – it’s there in the background, partially hidden by the beautiful though much-weathered wooden sign captioned “Proud to be American”. Flickr member John Kocijanski posted the photo on November 2nd of 2016, and the building it refers to is the old Channel Master factory in Ellenville, New York. Founded in 1949 at the dawning of the Golden Age of Television, Channel Master plant sold the factory in 1967 and the company declared bankruptcy in 2003.

Channel Master did not manufacture TV sets per se. Rather, the firm’s signature product was an innovative prefab TV antenna that unfolded instead of requiring on-site assembly. Channel Master also made transistorized signal boosters and antenna rotors. Flickr member RICHIE W (richie 59) brings us these images of the once-bustling Ellenville factory being demolished.

Tesla’s Czech Mate

Don’t tell Elon Musk but there’s another company by the name of Tesla, though they’re not auto manufacturers. TESLA held a monopoly on electronics manufacturing in the former Czechoslovakia between 1946 and 1989. Actually, Tesla Motors and the Czech TESLA legally butted heads over the name issue but eventually settled by agreeing to co-exist as such.

The abandoned TESLA Color Television factory in Roznov, near the Slovakian border, was hauntingly photographed by George Romanek in 2009.

Sanyo YOLO

Japanese-based Sanyo Electronics manufactured millions of television sets at its factory in Lowestoft, Suffolk, UK, back when television was THE major source of home entertainment. In other words, before the advent of the internet re-shaped the status quo.

The Sanyo plant employed up to 350 workers and supplied markets in the UK and Europe with roughly a half-million CRT sets annually over thirty-odd years.

By the turn of the century, demand for CRT televisions was plummeting and Sanyo management was faced with a critical decision: re-tool the factory to produce newfangled flat-screen TVs or cut their losses and close up shop. They chose the latter – even new technology couldn’t reverse an overall decline in television viewership.

The plant was shuttered in 2010 and demolished in 2014 but within that window of opportunity, urbex explorers Behind Closed Doors were able to capture the abandoned TV factory’s surprisingly well-kept interior.

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Down The Tubes 10 Closed Abandoned Tv Factories

These former battery factories once lead, er, led the way in electrifying society; now they sit abandoned in environs rife with heavy metal contamination.

The abandoned Power City Warehouse in Niagara Falls, New York began producing batteries for automobiles and tractors back in 1910. In the early 1940s, work of a classified nature was being conducted there in support of the Manhattan Project – the top-secret initiative charged with creating the atomic bomb. By the 1960s it had been bought by the Prestolite Company, who re-tolled the factory to manufacture hard rubber battery cases and to fill lead-acid batteries with sulfuric acid. The factory was abandoned in the late 1980s.

The EPA conducted a survey of the site in 2001 that revealed extensive contamination with lead, semi-volatile organic compounds, PCBs, and pesticides in the soil and buildings. Radioactive slag was discovered on the property in early 2012. Flickr user Kevin McBride (Mr Kevino) visited “The Battery Factory”, as it is known colloquially by urbex’ers, in August of 2008 to snap a small selection of photos… hope he wore appropriate clothing like, say a haz-mat suit.

Edison’s Other Bright Idea

Better buy glass company stock STAT – the former Edison Storage Battery factory in West Orange, NJ is being renovated and re-purposed into Edison Village and roughly 900 windows in the circa-1914 main building are due to be replaced.

The factory manufactured batteries for submarines, mining lamps, railroad signals and more. The Battery Building, abandoned since 1965, was the only remaining building in Edison’s once-enormous West Orange industrial complex aside from Edison’s old laboratory, now part of the Thomas Edison National Historic Park. One reason for its longevity was the special “Edison Cement” used in its construction – wrecking balls bounced off the outer walls leaving nary a dent.

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Nothing Shocking Abandoned Derelict Battery Factories

Ice ain’t all it’s cracked up to be and neither are these obsolete & abandoned factories that once made it, as these 12 examples coldly show.

Judging by their architecture alone, many abandoned ice factories can be dated back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – an era before the advent of economical household and commercial refrigeration. Home iceboxes, icehouses, fishing boats and ice cream producers had to acquire ice from somewhere, and that somewhere was the local ice factory.

Take Crystal Ice in Sacramento, California. Built in the early 1920s, the iconic local landmark was gutted by fire in November of 2015, likely derailing or at least substantially affecting extant plans for redevelopment as the Ice Blocks urban retail spaces project. Flickr user Jim Jackson (AxonJaxon) captured the former ice factory in comparatively better days – February of 2014 to be exact.

Nice House

The former Consolidated Ice Company Factory No. 2 located in Pittsburgh, PA’s Lawrenceville neighborhood opened in 1907 and closed in 1951. Hard to believe the factory wasn’t bought, demolished or re-purposed over the subsequent half-century but hey, such is life in the Rust Belt. On the bright side, the ice factory and its associated two-story office building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in the year 2000 and a portion is now being used by Ice House studios.

Chilling

Flickr user Rolfen captured the ruins of an abandoned ice factory in Öjersjö (near Gothenburg), Sweden in April of 2010. The photographer’s crisply detailed HDR images don’t detract from the overwhelming eeriness of the place – if anything, they enhance it!

Icy Hot

You’d think a place like Sharjah in the blisteringly-hot United Arab Emirates would do whatever it takes to keep their ice factory functioning… well think again. The abandoned Kalba Ice Factory now functions as an art exhibit space, presumably air conditioned.

The 2015 Sharjah Biennial 12 held at the abandoned ice factory featured a series of artificial columns composed of “natural elements such as leaves, bark, shells, coral and dead birds, alongside human consumer products in the form of plastics and deformed sport shoes.” Wait, dead birds??

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Outside The Blocks 12 Coldly Abandoned Ice Factories

Skyrockets red glare and bombs bursting in air were once sweet music to these abandoned fireworks factories, many of which ended with a bang not a whimper.

Wells Fireworks manufactured pyrotechnics at Dartford, Kent, UK from 1837 through the late 1970s, finally financially sputtering out under price pressure from cheap competition based in China. We’ll bet old Joseph Wells did not see that coming.

Many of the firm’s original factory buildings still stand (though not too steadily) at the now-overgrown and peaceful Joyce Green area of Dartford. Credit Flickr user Darren Cullern (innerbeast) with these images of the former Wells Fireworks factory taken on August 2nd, 2013.

Colombian Explosition

Fireworks factories make products that go BOOM… ideally, far from their place of origin. Premature explod-ulation is not cool – just the opposite! Kudos to Wells Fireworks for not blowing itself to smithereens even once during its 150-year-long history; incidents like the colorful explosion of a fireworks factory near Bogota, Colombia in January of 2015 are all too common.

Boom Boom Room

The office and administration building of an abandoned fireworks factory in Macau looks like it’s been through a battle or two in its day. Most likely it was built to survive an explosive calamity, which if you come to think of it is rather like being in a war. Betcha the boss of the place passed on the corner office with a view – wouldn’t you?

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Imploded 8 Burned Out Abandoned Fireworks Factories