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

Building booms around the world can render entire neighborhoods unrecognizable in a matter of days, demolishing historic structures to make way for new developments. In cities like Beijing, where older architecture such as “siheyuan” courtyard houses stand out for their uniqueness and beauty, the transition from traditional to contemporary can feel all the more jarring. Urban development is all but inevitable to manage growing populations, but for many onlookers, it’s sad to see the past bulldozed in favor of new buildings that don’t even acknowledge the area’s cultural and architectural legacy.

Many of Beijing’s older buildings fell in a frenzy of demolition throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Traditional “hutongs,” or ancient city alleys lined with siheyuan residences, had fallen into disrepair and often lacked basic services and sanitation. City planners reportedly saw the historic, hutong-filled core of the city surrounding Tianenmen Square and the Forbidden City as prime real estate. In the ‘90s, about 600 hutong were destroyed every year, displacing roughly 500,000 residents. In place of those neighborhoods built during the Ming Dynasty came glittering skyscrapers and eight-lane highways.

Only a few hundred complete courtyard houses remain, down from the 3,000 that stood during the 1980s. But among those that still exist, an interesting trend is taking root: modernization projects that preserve and honor the historic structures while making them suitable for 21st century lifestyles. The best examples of respectful Chinese courtyard house renovations repair and maintain the existing elements of the siheyuan, keep the courtyards open to the outdoors and add new complementary elements that augment the usefulness of the original buildings without diminishing their character.

Transforming Formerly Hidden Courtyards into Inclusive Spaces

Designing homes around courtyards is an ancient tradition in China, with evidence of walled-in yards going as far back as the Shang Dynasty (approx. 1700 – 1100 BCE). The houses themselves opened out onto the alleyways outside, creating tranquil and private outdoor spaces protected from the eyes of strangers. This layout is similar to that of Beijing itself, which began as a walled city arranged like a checkerboard according to Confucian code. Each courtyard contained at least two trees along with water features and caged birds. Originally, each siheyuan was occupied by a single (often wealthy) family, but over time, they came to be inhabited by groups of families forming their own tiny villages. Many have since been converted into businesses.

The walls of a hutong “can be seen as a boundary between public and private venues,” acknowledges the firm MINOR Lab, which completed this renovation in the Dongcheng District in 2017 updating an old hutong with lots of transparent glass, translucent textured acrylic panels for privacy and warm wood. But their project, like many others, transforms these former residences into spaces that are meant for community use.

“Within the walls remains an inward and enclosed space, however, the yard resembles a vast container, letting in sky, wind, sunlight, air and sound. The crowns of the two grand gingko trees are the flowing roof in the open air, overlapping layers of grey tiles. The exterior space under the trees connects to the interior one underneath the four roofs, floating and exchanging in a continuous way.”

An interesting project by the firm CAA explores the continuation of multi-family and multi-generational hutong traditions in a way that can help support the owner’s aging parents, who have Alzheimer’s Disease. CAA kept the hutong’s original wooden structure and added an additional steel roof, creating larger windows and skylights in the existing structures to make them brighter. The layout of the courtyard and the surrounding houses gives each generation their own private living space, but they’re connected to each other, and the flat, accessible courtyard allows the client’s mother to get around in her wheelchair.

“Tea House in Hutong” by ARCHSTUDIO is a striking example of the bolder approach. Forced to demolish parts that were too unsafe to keep, the architects added new wood and metal structures and created more enclosed spaces protected from the elements by adding a white-painted concrete roof. Openings to the outdoors are glassed in like atriums, and you can still get a sense of the original space as you gaze across the courtyard despite all of these alterations.

The same firm took an old siheyuan in Beijing’s Dashilar Area and transformed it into a public space with a dramatic, river-like undulating surface of grey brick that flows in and out of the interior and exterior spaces. Curved walls hide auxiliary spaces like the kitchen, bathrooms, private guest rooms and storage areas while visually connecting communal spaces like the dining room and reception to the courtyard. It’s not subtle by any means and it doesn’t shy away from ultramodern touches, but somehow the combination of old and new still feels cohesive.

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Art Of The Chinese Courtyard Respectful Renovations Keep Hutongs Alive

When historic structures have fallen into ruin, should architects restore them to their original glory or acknowledge the passage of time? The answer to that question might depend on the significance of the building (and whether or not it’s legally protected), its condition and the client’s vision for its new purpose, but projects that take on this task run the gamut from painstakingly minimalist interventions to dazzling contrasts of old and new. A variety of approaches give new hope to buildings that seem beyond repair, even when all that’s left is a pile of rubble.

Minimal Interventions

Sometimes, the best solution is to allow the ruins to be what they are while adding some functionality back to the structure. These new additions might only include elements that make the building safer and more usable, or they might exert some architectural style of their own, standing out as contemporary against the aged stone.

In the case of Pi des Catalá Tower, a protected landmark on the smallest of Spain’s Balearic Islands, architect Maria Castelló Martínez made interventions “involving only the parts that jeopardized the life of the building most of all.” Local sandstone almost identical to the original materials fills in some damaged areas without hiding the chronological differences between the original substrate and the intervention process. Corten steel contrasts yet complements, reinforcing the doorways and windows, weathering along with the rest of the structure.

From afar, you might not even notice that anything has been added to these 700-year-old medieval ruins in Eastern Jutland, Denmark. Only from certain angles do the new observational staircase elements by MAP Architects become apparent, poking out of the crumbling brick. Visitors can take in the way time has altered the original structure of Kalø Castle from the zig-zagging staircase and use their imaginations to fill in the blanks. To make sure the ruins were up to the task of supporting the new staircase, the architects digitally scanned every individual brick with a portable 3D scanner, and only attached it to the ruins at four integral points.

The 16th century Blencowe Hall in England was added to the national ‘Buildings at Risk’ register after the roofs collapsed in the towers flanking either end, producing a large gash in the facade. Working with the owners and a local architect, Donald Insall Associates re-roofed the building, stabilized threatened areas and inserted a new facade behind the gash without attempting to close it up or hide it. The result is striking, especially at night.

Preserving Ruins As They Are

A 300-year-old cottage has been saved from falling into total ruin by a highly unconventional renovation you’d expect to see in a museum rather than a functional home. David Connor Design and Kate Darby Architects left almost everything intact, enveloping it all within a protective new shell.

“The strategy was not to renovate or repair the 300-year-old listed building, but to preserve it perfectly,” they say. “This would include the rotten timbers, the dead ivy, the old birds nests, the cobwebs and the existing dust. The ruins would be protected from the elements within a new high performance outer envelope. This means that in most places there would be two walls, two windows and two roofs, old and new.”

Ferran Vizoso Architecture took a similar approach with a church in Corbrera d’ebro, Spain. A new, lightweight contemporary membrane made of ETFE panels covers the vulnerable open roof to keep the building from deteriorating further, but in this case, the protective element is barely visible from outside. The windows have been enclosed, as well, creating a newly re-inhabitable space. Other reinforcements, like metal supports under fragile archways, are subtle enough to escape notice.

Ruins as Facades for New Houses

Whereas that English cottage preservation was virtually turned inside-out, with new construction on the outside, a more popular technique for restoring ruins keeps the outer appearance of the original structures intact while placing all interventions inside. If the dilapidated building is fairly intact, you might barely be able to tell anything has changed at all, as is the case with La Ruina Habitada by Estudio Jesus Castillo Oli. The architects wanted to it to be an “inhabitable ruin,” giving the long-abandoned structure new life but keeping all the markers of its age.

In Dumfries, Scotland, the ruins of a 17th-century stone farmhouse remain exactly as they were when the clients purchased the property despite the fact that a new house has gone up within the original footprint. Lily Jencks Studio and Nathanael Dorent Architecture took great pains to barely touch a single stone on the farmhouse, building the new modern residence inside and around its walls.

The Dovecote Studio by Haworth Tompkins takes a similar course with a dilapidated brick building on a music campus in Suffolk, matching its hue with Corten steel.

Blending Architectural Styles with Sensitivity

When modern and historic architecture meet, the results can be controversial, but whether or not they’re successful might be subjective anyway. Purists bemoan any alternation whatsoever to a historic structure, hoping ruins can be restored as faithfully as possible, but that approach might not be appropriate for the given project, especially when it’s difficult or downright impossible to perfectly match the original materials. That was the idea behind one of the most divisive restoration projects in modern memory: the Vilhariques Tower and Matrera Castle in Spain.

Before architect Carlos Quevedo began, both structures were little more than a couple crumbled walls at risk of collapse. The Spanish government wanted the ruins to become educational facilities, but we don’t know exactly what these buildings used to look like, so Quevedo simply built new structures into what’s left of the originals, matching their approximate dimensions. Many locals were outraged, comparing the results to the infamously botched restoration of Elias Garcia Martinez’s fresco of Christ known as Ecce Homo.

But what about ruins located in more urban areas, or those that are still actively in use, but in dangerously poor condition? When they’re legally allowed to just demolish the ruins and start over, developers often choose to do just that. It’s a lot cheaper and easier. So it’s nice to see projects like the Kew House by Piercy & Company in London, which preserves an old stone wall to keep a modern home in character with the rest of the historic block.

The church of the Convent de Sant Francesc Santpedor in Spain had plenty of life left in it before architect David Closes was commissioned to convert it into a cultural facility, but it was in a rough state. The adjacent convent had already been demolished in the year 2000. The church wasn’t particularly well built in the first place, so Closes had his work cut out for him making it functional again. He identified its most striking characteristics, like the potential for natural light within its collapsed naves, and used new materials and modern finishes to highlight them. The damage to the church, all of its wounds and scars from over the years, is still visible, and the architect makes no attempt to pretend an intervention hasn’t taken place.

A similar story unfolds at the Vilanova de la Barca Church, which suffered bombings during the Spanish Civil War. Barcelona-based studio AleaOlea tells the story of what happened to the church with contrasting modern elements. The interruption and destruction of the historic building is starkly visible, but the new construction achieves an easy harmony with its monochromatic consistency.

Salvaging & Repurposing Fallen Components

Even when ruins seem too far gone to be preserved, they can remain a part of the landscape, infusing new construction with history and character. Bergmeister Wolf rebuilt a fallen wall and integrated it into a new, modern home that follows the same lines and contours as the original building.

For the magnificent ‘Aloni’ home on the Greek island of Antiparos, a residence straddling a valley, DecaArchitecture disassembled ruinous stone retaining walls on the property and incorporated them into the facade. Built into the hillside, the camouflaged holiday home maintains the look and feel of the land before it was changed and adapted for contemporary usage.

A site of national historical importance in rural China was in danger of disappearing before the studio 3andwich was tasked with transforming it into a tourist destination. The architects turned a collection of small deserted agricultural outbuildings and rubble from a fallen barn into a recreation of Yang’s School, which now serves as a bookstore and museum. This stone rubble forms the first floor of the main building of the new facility, with fresh wooden construction enclosing the second floor and roof.

Whichever road an architect may choose to take, it’s nice to see some elements of history preserved and maintained, creating less waste while establishing a tangible connection between past and present.

Passing through historic Beijing neighborhoods, seeing only the preserved street-facing facade, you’d never know that surprisingly modern structures contrast with aging surfaces within the courtyards just out of sight. Instead of just demolishing the ‘hutong’ courtyard houses found only in this Chinese city, architects are adapting them to modern life, slotting houses, hostels, museums, tea houses, cinemas and more under the existing roofs.

Tea House by Archstudio

In a truly stunning adaptation, Archstudio has completed a tea house and cafe within an existing hutong house, enclosing it from above with new roofs while leaving atriums open for bamboo and other greenery. The intervention connects the site’s five existing structures with a glazed corridor following the path of the original courtyard, forming three tea houses with their own unique views.

Twisting Courtyard by Archstudio

A river of glossy grey bricks streams through the courtyard of a Siheyuan house in the Paizihutong area of Beijing, upgrading the historic architecture with spaces that meet modern requirements of living. Archstudio‘s stunning pathway arches over the new volumes and even continues right into the dining room as part of the floor.

Mini Hostel Inside Hutong by ZAO / standardarchitecture

The firm ZAO / standard architecture inserted a small hostel inside a renovated Beijing hutong, exploring the potential of small-scale accommodations that slot right into the city’s existing architecture instead of displacing it. The glazed facades of volumes made of board-formed concrete project into the courtyard, facing each other (in some cases, with views of toilets, much to the horror of many Westerners looking at these images.) “The result is an architectural operation that brings back the courtyard as generator of the program, as it activates the building by creating a direct relationship with its urban context.”

Lai Yard House by Minggu Design

Tucked away behind weathered brick facades near the ancient city wall of Beijing, this courtyard home was crumbling. Minggu Design protects and preserves the original Chinese architecture while enhancing and adapting it for the 21st century, inserting volumes made of wood and glass to complement the surroundings without overpowering them. They used the new volumes to intentionally block and filter light to the original interior, creating a tranquil cave-like feel.

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Preserving Architectural Gems 8 Beijing Hutong Plug Ins Update Historic Shells

Transparent additions to historic architecture physically expand the space while making the subtlest possible changes to the building exteriors, allowing you to see the original structures right through the glazed walls. Augmenting 500-year-old farmhouses,  Victorian row houses in London and some of Paris’ most iconic-looking apartment buildings, these modern glass extensions aim to blend in with the sky, offering transitions to gardens and bringing natural light into formerly dark interiors.

17th Century Manor Update by Jonathan Tuckey Design

Invisible from the street, this ‘ghostly’ addition to the 17th century Yew Street House in London by Jonathon Tuckey Design lets you see right through its walls to the original stone structure, disrupting its beautiful form as little as possible while adding a gorgeous light-filled dining space.

Farmer’s Cottage in Croatia by Proarh

Zagreb-based architecture firm Proarh renovated a dilapidated traditional Zagorje cottage in Croatia into a modern family home, retaining the external frame while replacing the existing porch with a transparent glass view facing a view of the mountains.

19th Century Parisian Photography Studio to Rooftop Apartments

This glass addition to a 19th century photography studio in Paris by Vincent Parreira Atelier is conceived as an ‘inhabited observatory’ perched atop a Haussmannian building in the city’s Opéra-Madeleine district.

Straatweg Extension by BBVH Architecten

An original masonry structure in Rotterdam, built in the 1930s, gets some much-needed natural light thanks to a two-story, all-glass wing added by BBVH Architecten, which features a transparent roof, facade and upper-level floor with an operable garage-style door leading out to the garden.

‘Salle Labrouste’ Former French National Library

A major overhaul to the French National Library by Bruno Gaudin and Virginie Bregal updated it for the 21st century while retaining its dazzling beauty, adding a glass gallery that serves as a rooftop promenade to link two sides of the structure’s quadrangle.

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Transparent Intentions 13 Glass Additions To Historic Architecture