#adaptive-reuse

#adaptive-reuse

Cheshm Cheran Bazi Playground by ZAV Architects winds through a vast olive orchard in Minoudasht, north-eastern Iran. Set beside the Cheshm Cheran building, a rural complex the studio completed in 2017 for visitor stays and collective farm activity, the playground extends the project into the orchard through a raised network of platforms, bridges, stairs, and play elements.

Malli, a womenswear brand from Almaty, decided it needed a closed showroom in addition to its existing stores a place where clients would visit only on selected days and strictly by appointment. The space they chose sits next to the brand's production workshop and was far from perfect: industrial, full of exposed services, and not particularly convenient in terms of layout.

A large office block next to Angel tube station could be converted into a hotel with a publicly accessible rooftop bar. The building, Regents House, was constructed in the 1980s for the Royal Bank of Scotland as a mix of extra office space for their staff and a disaster contingency centre should other offices around London become unusable. It was common thinking at the time that if a disaster occurred, they would need a backup office to keep on working.

The project occupies the site of a previous sports complex with a similar program, which was demolished due to structural issues. Retaining walls and part of the foundation from the old structure have been reused.

Beijing National Day School is renowned for its student-led, open and free campus culture. Every year, students initiate ten campus improvement proposals, which receive full support from the school authorities.

Under Fengyuzhu's overall curation, the village has been repositioned as the Ancient Banyan Literary Village. As a node within this larger framework, the project needed to do more than produce an architectural expression; it had to balance curatorial narrative, intensified new programs, and the memory of the site.

Hotels are no longer just places to lay one's head. They've become multifunctional environments comprising an ever-expanding set of services, catering to different types of clientele.

Ambulance for Monuments operates through a collaborative network of organizations and volunteers, redefining the role of the architect in heritage preservation by involving professionals, students, craftsmen, and local communities.

As housing affordability continues to challenge cities worldwide, recent initiatives highlight the growing intersection between policy reform and architectural response. In Spain, grassroots movements in Granada and Málaga have mobilized against tourism-driven speculation, calling for rent control, the expropriation of vacant properties, and stronger tenant protections as housing prices continue to rise.

Located in a former apartment, this project transforms a residential interior into a flexible creative studio for architectural practice and hands-on artistic production. The renovation honors the building's past while introducing a new spatial framework.

Victoria and Richard bought the Yankee in 2001, not long after losing their namesake brand in bankruptcy proceedings. The couple needed studio space (they eventually started another company in 2004), but, apparently, Manhattan was largely out of reach on their budget. And so they looked to the "fringes" of the island, as MacKenzie-Childs put it in an interview last year.

Occupying a former ground-floor commercial unit, the existing interior carried the accumulated traces of successive tenants, including uneven walls, residual structures, and fragmented layouts. Local planning regulations required the exterior facade to remain untouched, concentrating all architectural intervention within the historic envelope.

The project examines the integration of digital fabrication processes into reinforced concrete construction, highlighting that while materials such as steel and timber have undergone significant transformation through digital production methods, reinforced concrete has largely retained conventional casting techniques. The proposal aims to address this condition by incorporating digitally fabricated components into the construction system.

The modular, lightweight structure dialogues with the formerly abandoned Brutalist building housing the museum, transforming its skeletal concrete structure and its surrounding land into spaces for use, care, and encounter. The project reflects on the boundaries between unfinished urban architecture and the landscape, foregrounding the labor and stewardship often invisible in both urban and institutional contexts.

Emerging in large numbers during Vietnam's construction boom of the 1990s, tube houses are defined by their narrow plots and deep plans, often resulting in dim and stuffy interiors. Exutoire reorganizes the core of the building and relocates the staircase, previously positioned at the center and acting as a spatial barrier, to the back of the plot and removes transverse partitions to open up each level, allowing light and air to travel freely through the depth of the house.

The Exeter Road Pavilion is an adaptive reuse of a modest Victorian garden outbuilding in northwest London, redesigned for an art collector and amateur DJ who wanted a place equally suited to storing books, records, and artworks as to hosting garden gatherings, workouts, and the occasional ping-pong match. Our brief was twofold: create an interior cabinet for storage and an exterior canopy for shelter. From the outset, we saw these as a single architectural problem rather than two separate tasks.

Maxime Verret + 25 Office Lead Architects: Arthur Boustouller (CALQ Architecture), Axel Cornu, Gabriel Verret (COVE Architectes) Design Team: COVE Architectes, CALQ Architecture Architecture Offices: CALQ Architecture Interior Design: Ramy Fischler Studio Engineering & Consulting > Other: Mazet & Associes, Ceef BET Engineering & Consulting > Structural: Egitura Engineering & Consulting > Electrical: Pollen Engineering & Consulting > Environmental Sustainability: Citae

Jonas Bjerre-Poulsen + 19 Category: Barn, Houses, Adaptive Reuse More SpecsLess Specs Jonas Bjerre-Poulsen Text description provided by the architects. Set close to a small harbour, Lakeshore Barn House is shaped by restraint and clarity, drawing from the familiar silhouette of rural barns to sit naturally within the small lakeside village. The simple cross- shaped layout establishes a central axis that opens uninterrupted views through the house in both directions, strengthening the connection between landscape and interior.

The expansion of Dexamenes Seaside Hotel extends K-Studio's transformation of a former wine factory into a coastal retreat in Greece. When the hotel first opened in 2019 in the western Peloponnese (see designboom's coverage here), its identity was shaped by the adaptive reuse of concrete fermentation tanks set directly along the Ionian shore. The cylindrical structures, once vessels for wine production, were converted into Beachfront Wine Tank Suites.

Across towns and city centers, they carry the shifting architectural ambitions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Greek Revival formality to Beaux-Arts monumentality and Art Deco ornament. Architects and federal planners would give these buildings a clear public role and a powerful physical presence. Stone façades, monumental halls, and crafted interiors projected stability, trust, and permanence. The post office placed the federal government directly into the everyday landscape of American life.