Cities, especially older cities, are experiencing a degeneration process. Older buildings are over-used and abandoned. Old districts are deteriorating and gradually being overlooked. As industries progress along, newer industries replace the old ones. Old factories are no longer up to the standard of the new industries and have lost their lifeline. How to bring back these old buildings is a question we architects like to ponder and spend time to find good answers to. Old buildings should not be simply torn down. History that is a part of these old buildings should not be swept away.

Then the challenge is to make the old building work for the new use. Hence there comes the age-old solution of adaptive reuse.

Adaptive reuse refers to the process of reusing an existing building for a purpose other than which it was originally built or designed for. It is also known as recycling and conversion. Adaptive reuse is an effective strategy for optimizing the operational and commercial performance of built assets. G+SAAN designers constantly seek out opportunities to use adaptive reuse as a tool to solve urban degeneration problems.

This project of a vacant factory in Wuhan’s urban industrial district. The existing buildings were one-story manufacturing spaces for a bedding factory closed down in 2012. We were hired to provide a master plan and architectural design concept for a mega medical-themed mixed-use development on this site and its immediate surroundings. We proposed adaptive reuse to keep the memory of the factory.

Our design proposes to remove most of the exterior skin walls and roofs while keeping structural columns and roof trusses. Two new modules are added to the high-volume center bay with truss and grid to create a covered multifunctional court at the front entrance. This court will be used as communal space for building tenants, as well as for other outdoor events. This is further extended into the plaza space which will have a contemporary landscape scheme of “storm” to reinforce a sense of place.

Modulated office spaces are built into the existing smaller bay. Using spaces above the pitched roofline adds a second floor to the building, brings down the scale, and creates a sense of privacy. Dark grey brick, white-painted structural frames, and black storefronts help to convert this old factory into a modern, artistic, and fashionable urban center.

Adaptive reuse allows us to have a uniquely styled medical R&D center while keeping the historical context of this site continued. For more information about the overall master plan of this mega medical campus, please see our project listing in the category of Healthcare under the name of Denovo Life Science Park.