NOARQ | José Carlos Nunes de Oliveira   Portugal   Trofa is Portugal’s youngest municipality, belonging to the district of Porto, in the north. For more than 25 years, the City Council occupied spaces scattered across the city. A 2016 competition to turn some old industrial facilities into a single T

Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios   United Kingdom   Shrewsburg Flaxmill Maltings was originally built in 1797 and served different purposes in the course of time, including as military barracks during World War II. The site closed in 1987. A work of Charles Bage, the listed building is known as the ‘g

Sergison Bates architects EM2N Architekten noA architecten   Belgium   In January 1924, industrial designer André Citroën opened the brand’s first foreign branch on Place Sainctelette in Brussels. Years later, in 1933, and following the original sketches drawn by Citroën himself, plans were carried out to include a larg

ATAMA   Belgium   This industrial-like building, built in 1940 and formerly a fire station, has been transformed into a meeting point for the community. At the base of the tower, now home for a climbing club, the central plaza forms a market hall space that opens up t

COBE Architects   Estonia   The Danish architecture firm Cobe has been tasked to turn the historic Krulli steelworks into a mixed-use district – with housing and offices – in the Estonian capital. The masterplan is based on transforming, reusing (from materials and components t

Kengo Kuma OODA architecture   Portugal   This project involved turning an old slaughterhouse into a cultural, social, and business center for the northern Portuguese city of Porto. Comprising 22,000 square meters, the intervention sought to revitalize a degraded place in disuse, respecting

Mendoza Partida BAX studio   Slovenia   An international competition held in 2008 was won by the Barcelona firms Mendoza Partida and BAX, thanks to a scheme that transformed a building of great historical value into a cultural facility while reactivating the banks of the river Ljubljanica

OFIS Architects   Slovenia   In the 1960s, the architect Savin Sever designed a building to house the printing house of the publisher Mladinska knjiga. Located in the Slovenian capital, the modular, repetitive construction is characterized by a visible concrete structure. The ol

Arquitecturia   Spain   An old construction on the premises of the agricultural cooperative of Flix – a municipality in Ribera de Ebro, a comarca of the province of Tarragona – has been turned into a cultural center. Counting a built area of 524 square meters, the new spac

Prokš Přikryl architekti   Czech Republic   Standing on the banks of the Chrudimka River, the Automatic Mills of the city of Pardubice, a work of the Czech architect Josef Gočár, were built in 1909. A grain silo was added in 1924. The mills ran uninterruptedly for over a century, until 2013, a

Assemble BC Architects & Studies   France   Le Magasin Électrique is part of a complex previously used for the construction and maintenance of trains, built in the mid-19th century, and now harboring the Luma Arles art center. The revamp begin in 2013 and gave rise to the Frank Gehry-designed

Mestres Wåge Arquitectes Mendoza Partida BAX studio   Norway   The Kunstsilo Art Gallery has opened in what was a grain silo raised in the 1930s, in the Norwegian city of Kristiansand. The transformation of the huge agricultural facility built with reinforced concrete to harbor a collection of over 5,500 Nordic

Vector Architects   China   In the heart of the city of Jingdezhen, known for its porcelain production, stands this hotel designed with the idea of preserving the constructions of an old industrial complex, including the existing camphor trees. The entire program is organized a

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. The

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   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

AV Proyectos 125 dedicates its cover to social heritage, a concept that includes the conversion of industrial buildings into civic spaces. As Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats point out in the article that accompanies the section, such interventions aim t

Enrique Morillo   Where most saw nothing but old industrial warehouses, Elena Fuertes, Ramón Martínez, Álvaro Molins, and Jorge Sobejano discovered a field of opportunities to develop their syncretic imaginary. After coinciding at Taller de Casquería, they set up BURR

Ricardo Flores   Eva Prats   The new occupation of industrial ruins places us before gigantic structures, of very generous dimensions, where it seems anything can fit, anything can be, and in a total silence. Large volumes of air and amounts of natural light come in through skyl

We are living in interesting times, and the vanishing into thin air of previously solid certainties applies also to architecture. The situation of architects proliferating and in precarious employment conditions, of competition systems dying out, and

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.