MAD Architects   China   The renovation to be carrried out by the Ma Yansong’s firm focuses on the Wanmicang warehouse on the south side of the Shanghai Zhangjiang Cement Factory, which was built in 1971 and ceased operations in 2013. Through the juxtaposing of old and new s

Productora   Mexico   Laguna was a textile and yarn factory built in the 1920s in Mexico City’s Doctores neighborhood. Carried out by the local firm Productora (Carlos Bedoya, Víctor Jaime, Wonne Ickx, Abel Perles), the project returns the manufacturing facility to its or

GCA Architects   Spain   This refurbishment project turns an 1850 industrial building in Barcelona’s Eixample district into offices for Fundació Bofill, a non-profit entity created in 1969 to promote social change. A work of GCA Architects, founded in 1986 by Josep Juanpere

Harquitectes   Spain   The Sabadell-based studio Harquitectes has transformed an old industrial building located in Esplugues de Llobregat into the corporate headquarters of the pharmaceutical company Galenicum. With a new envelope that provides better insulation to cool t

Herzog & de Meuron   United States   The Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron was commissioned to restore the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Power Station, built in 1904, and transform it into an art manufacturing hub. In the 1950s, half the original structure – the Boiler House – was demolished.

Tuñón y Albornoz Arquitectos   Netherlands   The team formed by the Spanish practice of Tuñón y Albornoz and the Belgian firm Dhoore-Vanweert Architecten has won the public tender to revamp the Landbouwbelang block in the Dutch city of Maastricht. Covering a built area of 40,500 square meters,

Boltshauser Architekten   Switzerland   The project recovers the original spaces and materials from the industrial site, using a contemporary language for the new additions and rescuing the historic boiler house, the symbolic landmark of the factory and of great importance for the city...

Lacol Arquitectura Cooperativa   Spain   Raised in 1926, these listed old industrial sheds in Barcelona’s Sants neighborhood were used for building naval ships. After undergoing refurbishment, the one that takes up half the block harbors offices of various entities (including Lacol Arquitec

Aurelien Chen   China   In Jinxing, in China’s Hebei Province, the French architect Aurelien Chen led the CSCEC’s design team tasked with turning a canteen of coal mine workers into a multipurpose cultural facility. The project adapted the construction to accommodate new us

Studioninedots   Netherlands   As part of a larger urban plan, the 'Bovenbouwwerkplaats' project turns a 1905 building where large elements of trains were manufactured into a cultural center for the Dutch city of Utrecht. The refurbishment of the warehouse involved preserving and

Sol89   Spain   Since pre-Roman times, the Gulf of Cádiz has been a center for Almadraba tuna fishing, in accordance with a technique that has barely changed since then. To oversee exploitation in the waters of the mouth of the river Piedras, from 1929 to 1963 there

IDOM   France   In Tarbes, a commune in the Occitanie region of France’s Hautes-Pyrénées department, the firm IDOM – directed by Inés López Taberna, Iñaki Garai and Gohar Manrique San Pedro – transformed a building used in the early 20th century for the military ind

Foster + Partners   Spain   Ombú, developed by Acciona, is the project to recover a Neo-Mudéjar industrial warehouse in Madrid, originally built in 1905 by Luis de Landecho. The historic envelope and the load-bearing structure that supports the pitched steel trusses have been p

Foster + Partners   Spain   This retrofit project breathes new life into a historic industrial building in Madrid, creating a sustainable exemplar of building reuse and revitalizing the surrounding area. With over 10,000 square meters of new office space, the project unifies a

Burr Studio   Spain   In an old industrial shed between two rear courtyards, a house is organized around a band that contains utilitarian spaces while separating the private from the more public areas. Attached to the wall of white concrete blocks are different functions

Jovino Martínez Sierra Arquitectos   Spain   After a meticulous work of fine tuning, several cultural uses will reactivate what now is the only surviving building of a lock manufacturing plant with deep roots in the memory of the place.

SO-IL FREAKS freearchitects   France   The Northern Vosges Regional Natural Park encompasses about a hundred French municipalities and one is Meisenthal, also known for its glassworks. The outcome of a 2015 competition, the project carried out by the New York firm SO-IL and the Paris stud

Flores & Prats   Spain   Cal Maiol School draws on the character and the past of Can Batlló, associated with industrial activity. The new complex includes the existing transformer station and establishes a relationship with it in terms of type, construction, structure, and p

Flores & Prats   Spain   The project to refurbish and extend the industrial complex respects the old buildings, a series of warehouses for metallurgy and textile uses; but also the environment, with special attention to the street’s character, its trees, and how much light o

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   Russia   Built between 1904 and 1908 in Bálchug (Bolotny óstrov), a river island in the heart of Moscow, GES-2 was a power station. The old plant is now a space conceived as an experience of going from visual to performing arts, via a welcoming civic space. T

Fernández-Abascal + Muruzabal GFA2   Spain   Subtle interventions enhance a necessary cleaning job in the project of reconstructing a deteriorated port facility and then fitting it out as home to an institution’s collection of artworks.

estudioHerreros   Spain   An old warehouse occupies the heart of a block in the urban expansion of Bilbao. It is accessed through a long and narrow tunnel that crosses the ground level of the residential junctions. Its interior contains a simple program that addresses the bas

Herzog & de Meuron   Germany   A new wing has been discreetly added to the complex of brick industrial buildings that were originally transformed by the studio in the 1990s into a museum of contemporary art. Aligned with the rest of the industrial constructions near Duisburg’s Inn

Modernity has had a curious destiny: to devour itself like the god Saturn his offspring. Conceived as demands of a present that wanted to be the future, the modern tenets have suffered the passage of time like few things are able to do, to such a deg

Nave Fabra & Coats With Fabrizio Barozzi at the helm and joined by Agnès Blanch, Daria de Seta, Manel Marín, Pedro Matos Gameiro, and Rosa Rull, the jury of the 2021 FAD Awards bestowed the Architecture prize on the 46-unit social housing development

With the same expansionist strategy that led it to open branches in Málaga, Brussels, and Shanghai, the Centre Pompidou will soon be making a landing in America with the help of Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture, which is refurbish

The youngest generations of architects have demonstrated that Catalan architecture can well pursue courses deviating from the cosmopolitanism of disseny and Barcelona. It is true that the teaching and practice of the profession in Catalonia has to a

The Cádiz architect Francisco Reina has been slated to refurbish the 18th-century Royal Artillery Factory in Seville, for it to harbor 9,500 square meters of exhibition spaces, laboratories, and offices serving the Magellan Center for Ventures in Cul

The list of Madrid works by the British architect Norman Foster – Cepsa Tower, Axis at Plaza Colón, the Hall of Realms at the Prado Museum – will soon be including an office complex for the Spanish sustainable infrastucture and renewable energy cong

The primary objective of the EMAV Can Batlló project, designed by Julià i Capdevila, was to open up to the city an exceptional industrial block located in Barcelona’s Bordeta neighborhood. In the process, it respected the typological and material fea

Among the numerous challenges of architecture in this day and age is to redensify and repurpose the industrial fabrics that cropped up and grew on what were then the outskirts of our cities, but which are now embedded and trapped in the very heart of

The Guardian   Leyland Cecco   The prairie town of Andrew is no stranger to loss, but when its last grain elevator was slated for demolition, the community fought to win a stay of execution. For nearly a century, a wooden tower has loomed over the prairie town of Andrew in western

The firm of Thomas Heatherwick, known for the artistic stamp he is so good at giving his buildings and installations, has in London’s King’s Cross neighborhood just completed the Coal Drops Yard shopping center. This place was a complex of 19th-centu

Javier García-Gutiérrez Mosteiro   Among the extensions of the concept of architectural heritage that the 20th century saw, one of the most representative is that which concerns buildings and complexes of an industrial nature. 

The Citröen building in Brussels, an enormous industrial complex built in 1933, will be transformed into a new branch of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The result of a competition that was held for the purpose, the design drawn up by the team

The Milanese firm Piuarch has transformed the final assembly plant of an abandoned Caproni aircraft factory in Milan into a new headquarters for the fashion brand Gucci. Exceeding 35,000 square meters in floor area, the complex restores the original

The mountainous Yangshuo Country in southern China has just seen the opening of the Alilo Yangshuo resort hotel complex designed by the Beijing-based firm Vector Architects. The project involved retaining and repurposing the installations of an old,

Architecture parlante was an invention of French architects of the Enlightenment by which buildings explained their functions through their forms, tying up the rational with the expressive. From this arose projects of Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude

Luis Fernández-Galiano   In the midst of the Third Industrial Revolution, we must not forget the First and the Second. Between the 18th and 19th centuries, Europe was the stage of a huge technical and social mutation, the greatest experienced by humanity since the Neolithic

Miguel Ángel Álvarez Areces   Industrial vestiges, as cultural heritage of the first order, reflect the identity of landscapes and communities, but also present considerable economic potential.

Andrés Cánovas   If I were to reembrace Catholicism, I would surely end up dressed as a Catalan Jesuit and transported to Andalusia. And, like the Cordobese, bent on religion at any price, I would hear mass on Sundays in the mosque. “Mass is held in the mosque!” The

Las intervenciones en las antiguas naves del Matadero de Madrid han convertido a este enclave en un modelo de rehabilitación y en un importante foco cultural.

Situado frente a la ría de El Burgo, cerca de La Coruña, el edificio de la fábrica Cros —antigua manufactura de tostado de piritas para la producción de ácido sulfúrico construida en los años 1940— será rehabilitado para acoger un auditorio, una bibl

Iñaki Bergera   De almacén de alcoholes municipal a espacio cívico, la centenaria Alhóndiga ha cambiado de función sin perder carácter público; por el camino han quedado proyectos insólitos. 

El antiguo Matadero de Madrid, en el castizo barrio de Arganzuela, un gran conjunto industrial construido en los primeros años del siglo XX, sigue su proceso de reciclaje como contenedor y lugar de producción cultural. El último espacio incorporado e

Un antiguo depósito de grano situado a orillas del río Carrión flanqueando la Dársena del Canal de Castilla en Palencia ha sido rehabilitado como Museo del Agua por el estudio MID, dirigido por David Serrano Amatriain y Maier Vélez Olabarria. El prin