#adaptive-reuse

#adaptive-reuse

Tucked down a cobblestoned, tree-lined alley in the 11th arrondissement, just steps from the Place de la Nation, a Paris loft has been given a new life. The space, a former artist's studio turned residence, opens directly onto the street and is crowned by a transom window that floods the interior with natural light. Interior designer Caroline Pusset, who founded Studio Rœus with her sister, points to the soaring proportions as a starting point for the redesign.

Planned as an adaptive reuse of an industrial harbor structure, the project positions a former port building as a civic cultural facility woven into the maritime edge of the city. The proposal, with its dramatically curving rooftop, treats the existing fabric as a spatial and infrastructural resource, retaining its massing and presence while introducing architectural elements that enable public access and contemporary cultural use.

The potential of existing buildings to shape cities and communities in flux through reuse and adaptation is the key focus of HouseEurope! and their activism: addressing the pressing challenge across much of Europe, where it is often easier, cheaper, and faster to demolish buildings than to renovate.

Amid the tides of time, architecture bears witness to change, taking on new roles within the same site. Situated within an elementary school campus, the project occupies a rare, well-preserved early 20th-century residential buildingoriginally constructed during the Japanese colonial periodnow embedded within a contemporary educational environment. Once a humble dwelling, the space now serves as a rush-weaving classroom. Rather than restoring a relic, the design opens a dialogue between history and daily life, creating a third space between memory and use.

Even before the client decided to compete in the public sale of a military domain, he involved architect Maarten Dekoninck in his plans. He gave a positive recommendation and later transformed the brutalist building, characterized by concrete and steel windows, into a residential house with an office function.

Arid reworks and extends a two-story corner building from 1951 in the Patissia district of Athens into a hybrid residential, co-living, and co-working building. The project, dubbed Veil, renovates the original fabric and adds three new floors above it, resulting in an 850-square-meter building that engages directly with its neighborhood's spatial logic. The intervention is shaped by Karamanlaki Street's characteristic morphology, where setbacks generate 'prassies,' semi-open front gardens.

Florent Joliot + 9 Category: Educational Architecture, Schools Lead Team: Celine Tedde, Jerome Apack Design Team: AT architectes Engineering & Consulting > Structural: i2c Engineering & Consulting > Other: AD2i, PHD ingenierie Engineering & Consulting > Acoustic: Jean AMOROS Engineering & Consulting > Environmental Sustainability: DOMENE Landscape Architecture: Marie-Pierre Gregoire City: La Fare-les-Oliviers

Located at 76 Charlotte Street, the 2,000-square-foot basement-level space, dubbed Downstairs at dMFK, is accessed via a lushly planted mirrored lightwell, which creates the illusion that the space extends under the street. There are 16 workstations, meeting rooms, a kitchen, and a host of other sections that support focused tasks and group work. Vendors were invited to experiment in this ideal setting for their test products, as long as the items complemented the existing aesthetic.

As cultural institutions continue to proliferate worldwide in this digital era, the museum itself appears increasingly in need of redefinition. Rather than offering a single model or solution, Architecture for Culture: Rethinking Museums, written by architectural historian and curator Béatrice Grenier, argues for a more contextual and plural understanding of what a museum can be: an institution shaped by its environment, its public, and the specific cultural questions it seeks to address.

It's hard to think of two more fundamental social needs than a) not being forced to relieve yourself on the street and b) not having other people relieve themselves on the street yet the public toilet is an ignored and vanishing public amenity. The British Toilet Association reports that 40% of public toilets have closed since 2000 Victorian facilities in particular attract developers, not least because their dignified buildings endure: solidly built, centrally located and still embedded in the daily flow of the city.

The project concerns the first house in a row of four terraced dwellings, built along a narrow plot. Originally conceived as modest workshops made with ordinary materials, typical of the fabric of Bagnolet, these structures have gradually been converted into family homes. They belong to that fragile typology of small workers' houses-descendants of a precarious form of housing, sometimes close to the shack-whose transformation demands the utmost care.

The building was created by two couples who met in the early 1980s, after the mayor announced a program to help artists take over abandoned apartment buildings. There were lots of meetings, and lots of interested artists, but the program never took off. Garrick Dolberg liked the idea enough to try doing the work on his own. In 1981, he was a sculptor with a day job in construction.

Jo Nagasaka-led Schemata Architects completes the head office for Uchida Shōten, a hardware manufacturer with a 160-year history in Fujisawa City, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. The team roots the two-story wooden structure in the spatial logic of the historic town that surrounds it. The site sits along the former Tōkaidō road, once Fujisawa-juku, the sixth post town of the Edo period, where narrow, elongated plots shape a distinctive townhouse culture that still structures the area today.

Dun'ao Village in Xiangshan, Ningbo, sits inland among low hills and rice fields. The project began with a desire to reflect the calm, poetic atmosphere of this secluded landscape. Instead of rigid architectural frameworks, we initiated the design with sketches and poems, aiming for lightness, openness, and play. We revitalized three abandoned utility structures using a combination of steel containers and inflatable forms.

Renato Mangolin + 19 Category: Houses, Renovation Coordination: Amanda Arcuri Collaboration: Danilo Filgueiras, Gabriel Martucci Intern: Mariana Guimaraes Lighting Design: Diana Joels Civil Engineering Team: Plano C Arquitetura e Execucao Metalwork: Metalurgica Sena More SpecsLess Specs Renato Mangolin Text description provided by the architects. The objective was to reflect on the relationship between the kitchen and the other spaces of the Duvivier-Byington house, a project by the Carioca architect Lucio Costa dated 1988, located in Rio de Janeiro.

Perched at 10,600 feet in Colorado's Rocky Mountains, this home is a quietly powerful study in restraint, trust, and dialogue with the landscape. Designed by Gabriel Yuri of New Operations Workshop as an addition to his parents' retreat, the project balances a charred Shou Sugi Ban exterior with a luminous, oak-lined interior. Rooted in Japanese and Scandinavian traditions yet unmistakably American, the house preserves the original structure while reframing it around light, views, and family life.

Buildner has announced the results of its Re-Form: New Life for Old Spaces, an international ideas competition examining the adaptive reuse of small-scale existing buildings. The competition invited architects and designers to propose transformations of used, abandoned, or overlooked structures with an approximate footprint of 250 square meters, located anywhere in the world. With no fixed site or program, participants were encouraged to explore alternatives to demolition and new construction through reuse strategies grounded in contemporary social and environmental concerns.

All of the original structural concrete columns were left exposed, as were the cement floors and some areas of terrazzo. The effect is that there is a varied palette of stone and similar elements. "A nice surprise was finding numerals that had been painted on the structural columns and which date from the construction of the building," says Jáuregui. The studio decided to leave them as a nod to the structure's history.

For all its architectural and cultural grandeur, Vienna has never had much diversity of places to stay. The capital has long relied on a handful of storied institutions, while its culinary scene modernized around them. That's part of what makes the arrival of Mandarin Oriental Vienna, the group's first outpost in Austria, so significant. More than a decade in the making, this landmark transformation of an Alfred Keller-designed courthouse, built in the early 20th century, signals a new era of hospitality for the Austrian capital.

People really show up for the arts here. Our event is run by artists in the building. It's been growing so much over the past few years. This year has been very very busy, it's crazy.

Bistro Ferdinand, located in Bratislava's iconic Sad Janka Krala park, was designed following a public tender for a new tenant. The project revitalized the original pavilion by architect Ferdinand Koncek from 1982, which was renovated in 2024 by Jan Studeny and Peter Stec. The interior aims to reflect the atmosphere of the park and foster a sense of community. Conceived as the main bistro of the park, Ferdinand is open, inclusive, and welcoming.

Designing for yourself is always a bold move, and in Lviv, KOSHULYNSKYY & MAYER co-founders Karina Mayer and Danylo Koshulynskyy prove why it's worth it. Their 1,000-square-foot KM Home sheds the developer's original layout in favor of something far more intentional. The home feels tailored, efficient, and deeply personal, a layout that actually supports the way they live day to day.

The phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution describes how distant species can develop similar structures when confronted with comparable challenges. Dolphins and ichthyosaurs, for example, are separated by millions of years of evolutionary history, yet both evolved nearly identical hydrodynamic bodies. Architecture has its own parallels: A-frame structures emerged independently in both the European Alps and Japan, even without direct cultural exchange, as spontaneous responses to snow, wind, and material scarcity.

Palestinian architect Suad Amiry has been awarded the 2025 Great Arab Minds Award in the Architecture and Design category. Founder and director of the Riwaq - Centre for Architectural Conservation, Amiry was recognised for her long-standing work in documenting, preserving, and reusing Palestinian architectural heritage through conservation practices that link historic structures with contemporary community needs. Her approach positions architecture as both a repository of collective memory and an active social framework, emphasising the role of heritage in everyday urban and rural life.

Situated between the City of Arts in Valencia and the piles of containers in the port of Pinedo, the area of La Punta is barely surviving the macro-projects that surround it. Several dozen creators have been defending local culture for some time now in Pluto, a safe and collaborative working environment in La Punta, just a 10-minute bike ride from the city centre.

This 400-square-meter space is a dynamic environment that easily transforms from a campus canteen during the day to a corporate event location in the evening, meeting the varied needs of guests and the campus community.

In the far north of Norway, above the Arctic Circle where daylight stretches-or vanishes-for months at a time, a former cod liver oil factory has been thoughtfully revived. On the island of Henningsvær in the Lofoten archipelago, Trevarefabrikken-once an industrial outpost and later abandoned-has found new life as a hotel, restaurant, and cultural space shaped by community effort and the careful hand of London-based Tuckey Design Studio.

The Butterfly + First Baptist Church Complex - As cities densify and land grows scarcer, sacred sites - long seen as untouchable - are emerging as unexpected catalysts for urban transformation.

At the scale of the built environment, these themes are echoed in three projects shaping future urban conditions: Powerhouse Company's transformation of a former limestone quarry into a mixed-use neighbourhood in Bærum, near Oslo; the groundbreaking of Riverside Wharf, a hospitality-led development contributing to the regeneration of Miami's River District; and Foster + Partners' approved retrofit of 1 St James's Square in London, focused on structural retention and long-term urban resilience.

Extending across two cities, two regions, and two autonomous provinces, the competitions will be staged over more than 22,000 square kilometres of Northern Italy. Metropolitan venues in Milan are paired with longstanding Alpine centres in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Livigno, Bormio, Anterselva, and Val di Fiemme, creating a framework that bridges urban and mountain contexts. More than 90 per cent of the venues are existing or temporary facilities, reflecting a strategy centred on adaptive reuse, selective upgrades, and long-term integration into regional sport and cultural infrastructures.