We translate industrial structures into spaces for living.
An incomplete index of translated structures, 2020—
A 1942 freight hangar with eight steel trusses spanning 24 meters. We retained every truss and let the original concrete floor decide the new partitions. The roof gained skylights cut along the joists. The space remembers what it lifted.
Materials — Steel · Concrete · Glass · Birch
A small iron foundry, in service from 1908 to 1996. We kept the brick crucible bays as alcoves and inserted maple platforms above the cooling channels. The east wall stays sooty. We do not paint over what the work made.
Materials — Brick · Iron · Maple · Lime plaster
A municipal tram depot from 1928, retired 2018. We retained the catenary trusses, scored every concrete bay with a 60mm channel, and inserted timber housings on a 1.2m offset. The roof is original. The light is the same light tramcars left under in 1989.
Materials — Steel · Concrete · Oak · Glass
A boiler hall serving a former sugar refinery, built 1912. The two cast-iron boilers stayed; we framed living quarters around them as if the boilers were furniture. Pipes route warm water through the existing steam channels in winter.
Materials — Cast iron · Riveted plate · Slate · Oak
A 28-meter water tower from 1899. Currently in survey. The reservoir at the top will become a single round room. The shaft becomes a stair, slow. We are deciding whether to drain the tower or let it ring like a bell.
Materials — Stone · Cast iron · Copper · Glass
A 19th-century maltings building with three drying floors, last grain in 1981. We removed nothing structural. New floors slip between the existing levels at half their height, doubling the readings of the section. The smell of barley took two years to leave.
Materials — Brick · Oak · Iron · Lime
A 14-bay locomotive roundhouse around a turntable from 1873. The turntable will become an inner courtyard. Each bay holds one apartment, fan-shaped, narrow at the hub, wide at the rim. The pit beneath the turntable holds the rainwater system.
Materials — Brick · Cast iron · Rails · Birch
An automated high-bay warehouse from 1976, decommissioned 2023. Twenty-four meters tall, forty meters long. We are studying whether the existing crane rails can carry inhabited platforms. The decision is between a single great room and forty small ones. Both drawings exist.
Materials — Steel · Galvanized plate · Polycarbonate · Spruce
Six weeks of measure, photograph, and sit. We do not bring a vocabulary; we learn one. Materials and proportions enter the practice from the building, not the catalogue.
The first design move is removal. We earn every new line by deleting an old one. The drawing gets thinner before it gets fatter. Reuse means we can afford to take less.
We adopt the building's grid. Mezzanine on the bay. Window on the column. Wall on the rivet. New work obeys old geometry — the building's logic continues into ours.
When the building once said "industry," we let it keep saying it. We add living, we do not subtract memory. The new plan is a footnote on the old one, not an erasure.
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Set in Bebas Neue & Inter.
Code in JetBrains Mono.
City drawing — Munich, traced 2026.
Built in 2026.
Photography — site survey archive.
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