Adaptive Reuse: The Latest Architecture and News

During the last week of August, the New York City government announced a new project for the MADE Bush Terminal in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. It involves the transformation of the old industrial building into a center for the recovery, storage, sorting, and redistribution of construction materials during a one-year pilot program. The initiative echoes a wave of similar circular construction hubs recently launched or announced across Europe: a converted warehouse in Brussels, an industrial site adaptation in East London's Royal Docks, and a cross-border network supported by CirCoFin spanning Munich, Copenhagen, Lisbon, and Scotland, each repurposing industrial buildings and infrastructure to support the reuse of construction materials.

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Mexico's rapid urban growth over recent decades has left many cities struggling with fragmented neighborhoods, high crime rates, and severe shortages of quality public spaces. In many low-income urban areas, informal development occurred alongside raw infrastructure like drainage canals, rail lines, and steep ravines, dividing communities and creating hazardous vacant zones. To address this spatial segregation and lack of civic amenities, public agencies and architects across Mexico are intervening in these abandoned buffer zones to construct public parks. By converting former physical barriers into accessible pedestrian corridors, these projects rejoin separated neighborhoods, re-establish safe visual sight lines, and provide spaces for community gathering and daily recreation.

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Seen from the water, Tallinn presents the skyline of a Hanseatic merchant town. During the Soviet period, most of the seafront was a restricted military zone, leaving the harbour as one of the few places where the city and the sea could meet. Even Linnahall, the vast concrete venue built for the sailing events of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, was positioned in part to preserve the view of the old town for ships approaching the harbour. For half a century, Tallinn grew away from the water that had made it a trading city, so when independence was restored in 1991, some of the capital's most valuable land was also among the least familiar to its inhabitants.

Tallinn's recent architecture is largely an architecture of reconnection. The city has been reopening what was cut off and adapting what lost its purpose, while building new structures where the boundaries between city, infrastructure and landscape are still being negotiated. The factories around the medieval centre, from Rotermann's mills near the port to the submarine yards at Noblessner, had lost their original purpose. Their gradual conversion has since become one of the defining stories of contemporary Tallinn. Much of this architecture is deliberately quiet, deriving its impact from the way old structures, new uses and the waterfront have been brought back into the life of the city.

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The Chinati Foundation has announced plans to restore the Artillery Sheds in Marfa, Texas, the former military buildings adapted by artist Donald Judd to house his 100 untitled works in mill aluminum, created between 1982 and 1986. Led by architect Troy Schaum of Schaum Architects, the multi-year preservation project is being developed with the Getty Conservation Institute and will address the historic buildings' envelope, accessibility, environmental performance, and landscape while preserving Judd's site-specific installation. The project follows the Artillery Sheds' inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places in 2025 as part of the expanded Donald Judd Historic District.

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The 2026 Oslo Architecture Triennale will take place from September 17 to October 1 at Sofienberg Church in Oslo, bringing together more than 30 international architecture projects around the question "What if Nature Comes First?" For its ninth edition, the Triennale will adopt a two-week festival format, combining an exhibition with conferences, seminars, workshops, film screenings and guided walks. Curated by Line Ramstad, the programme will examine how placing nature at the starting point of architectural decision-making could influence what is built, preserved, transformed or left untouched.

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Architecture in Brazil this month highlights the country's diverse approaches to cultural production, heritage, and the transformation of its built environment. From the curatorial formation of the 15th São Paulo International Architecture Biennial to the recognition of Amazonia Theaters on the UNESCO World Heritage List, recent developments bring questions of representation, preservation, and cultural identity into focus. New projects in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Rondônia meanwhile explore adaptive reuse, relationships between architecture and landscape, and new approaches to materiality and sustainability. Alongside these developments, ongoing discussions surrounding Fordlândia and the archive of Lucio Costa revisit how Brazil's architectural heritage is preserved, interpreted, and understood today.

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Craft in contemporary interiors is increasingly valuable in the way materials are joined and brought into relation with one another. As the appetite for fast, inexpensive, and profitable retrofitting grows, there is also a parallel desire for interiors that feel thoughtfully resolved: spaces where details are integrated, material assemblies are considered, textures transition with intention, and hardware is treated as part of the architectural language rather than an afterthought. In many contemporary Chinese interiors, craft operates quietly through the treatment of surfaces and structures: timber that retains its irregularity, terrazzo that records aggregate and handwork, or finishes that reveal the care of their making.

This is especially important in an era when digital images increasingly reward smoothness. Rendered interiors often appear seamless, frictionless, and complete before construction has even begun. Craft complicates this image. It introduces tolerance, texture, material resistance, and the sense that a surface has passed through human hands before becoming architecture. Imperfection is not necessarily a failure of precision. To the eye that knows how to read it, it can become evidence of process.

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sauerbruch hutton and Studio Gang have been selected to renovate the German House in New York following an international competition organized by the Federal Republic of Germany. Located on United Nations Plaza in Manhattan, the building houses the Consulate General of Germany, the Permanent Mission of Germany to the United Nations, and several affiliated cultural institutions. The project marks the first collaboration between the two practices. Berlin-based sauerbruch hutton will serve as Lead Designer, while Studio Gang will act as General Planner and Architect of Record, overseeing project delivery and implementation. The proposal focuses on adapting the existing building, with the stated goal of extending its lifespan while improving its operational and environmental performance.

Hungary's architectural landscape spent the socialist decades being redrawn from above, its cooperative farms consolidated out of family plots and its standardized housing blocks distributed across the territory in a form that would have been identical anywhere else. The sociologist Virág Molnár, whose Building the State traces the political uses of architecture in postwar Hungary and East Germany, has made the case that this reshaping of the built environment was one of the political project's primary instruments and not a byproduct of it, a mobilization that carried through socialist modernization and into the transition that followed. The British critic Owen Hatherley, whose Landscapes of Communism explores the housing estates of Budapest alongside those of Warsaw and Kyiv, describes the far end of that same inheritance, where buildings have outlasted the ideology that commissioned them and remain occupied by people with little stake in defending the reasoning behind them.

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Craftsmanship carries the traces of those who shaped it, revealing how materials respond to different techniques and even offering clues about the tools used to create them. Within the architectural experience, however, craftsmanship can be expressed not only through materials and structures but also through space itself. Seeking to deepen and learn from the connections between design and execution, amass studio has explored the translation of informal, everyday construction methods into spatial systems across several of its projects. By integrating mechanisms, materials, structures, and furniture, the studio creates new spatial narratives in which the dialogue between the handcrafted and the industrial becomes mutually reinforcing. Beyond craftsmanship itself, then, why not make visible the processes that bring it into being?

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Images of the benches at New York City's High Line Park spread around the world when the project opened in 2009. Emerging diagonally from the same material and modular pattern as the paving, they transition seamlessly from concrete to wood, evoking the railway tracks that once occupied the site. To withstand decades of exposure to the elements, the project required a wood species of exceptional durability, and ipe, harvested from the Brazilian Amazon, was selected. Its slow growth produces a dense, low-porosity hardwood that is naturally resistant to wear, moisture, and biological decay. The choice, however, sparked controversy at the time amid concerns over the certification of the timber's forest management. This broader view changes how we think about materials. Their origin still matters, but so does what happens after the building's life comes to an end.

This article is part of our new Opinion section, a format for argument-driven essays on critical questions shaping our field.

Agritourism is commonly understood as a hybrid model, with equal parts of overlap between the agriculture and hospitality industries. Under this framing, agritourism is valued as a variation on an existing theme, a supplementary activity layered onto rural production. This framing no longer holds in the 21st century as the scale and independence of agritourism's growth have transformed it into a distinct economic sector, one with architectural consequences that neither the agriculture nor the hospitality industries are equipped to address in isolation.

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This week in architecture, discussions around the lifespan of buildings, the evolution of cultural institutions, and climate-responsive design highlighted how contemporary practice increasingly extends beyond the moment of construction. From debates over demolition and adaptive reuse to new museums that integrate landscape and environmental performance, the week's developments reflect shifting priorities around permanence, transformation, and public value. Alongside these projects, major institutional announcements, from the RIBA Stirling Prize shortlist to the election of a new UIA leadership, offer insight into the architectural agendas shaping the profession across different scales and geographies.

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Architecture often inherits a paradox. The buildings that come to define a place are rarely the only ones that shaped it. Instead, they become symbols, repeated through guidebooks, tourism campaigns, conservation agendas, and architectural histories until they stand in for an entire region. Over time, the richness of a built landscape is compressed into a handful of familiar images. What falls outside that frame rarely disappears. It simply slips from architectural discourse.

Few places illustrate this more clearly than Odisha. For decades, its architectural identity has been represented through the monumental stone temples of Bhubaneswar, Konark, and Puri. The sculptural sophistication of the Kalinga tradition has rightly earned international recognition, becoming one of India's most celebrated architectural legacies. Yet this prominence has also produced an unintended consequence. Odisha is frequently understood as a land of temples, leaving other architectural histories comparatively unexplored. Royal residences, administrative buildings, colonial encounters, vernacular settlements, and former capitals occupy a far smaller place in the architectural imagination despite revealing equally complex stories of governance, diplomacy, ecology, and cultural exchange.

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The conclusion of the FIFA World Cup 2026 marks the end of the tournament's largest edition to date. Hosted across Canada, Mexico, and the United States, the competition expanded to 48 national teams and brought together sixteen host cities distributed across three countries. For decades, FIFA World Cups have served as catalysts for architectural production. Each edition has generated a distinct collection of stadiums, transportation investments, public spaces, and urban interventions that often remain part of their host cities long after the tournament concludes. While recent competitions have become associated with landmark stadium projects and ambitious national building programs, the 2026 edition followed a different trajectory, relying primarily on existing venues adapted to FIFA's technical and operational requirements.

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The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced the six shortlisted projects for the 2026 RIBA Stirling Prize, marking the award's 30th anniversary. Established in 1996, the Stirling Prize recognizes the building considered to have made a contribution to the evolution of architecture in the United Kingdom. This year's shortlist spans a broad range of typologies, including a new public square above one of London's busiest transport interchanges, the adaptive reuse of a 1970s theater into a cultural venue, a high-density residential development, two projects for Cambridge colleges, and a family home set on the edge of Epping Forest. The winner will be announced on October 15 at Old Billingsgate in London.

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Architecture this week looked as much to the past as to the future. Across museums, restored landmarks, and large-scale urban redevelopments, the featured stories explored how architecture is continually reinterpreted through new cultural, political, and urban lenses. From reconsidering the architectural legacy of post-independence West Africa to transforming former prisons into energy-neutral neighborhoods and restoring twentieth-century cultural landmarks, the projects demonstrate how existing buildings and histories remain active participants in contemporary discourse. Alongside these interventions, the announcement of the World Architecture Festival shortlist and renewed attention to global urban growth provide a broader picture of a profession negotiating heritage, environmental responsibility, and rapidly changing cities.

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The Martin, a residential building designed by OMA's David Gianotten and Mariano Sagasta, has been completed in Amsterdam's Bajes Kwartier. Located within the Central Cluster of the 7.5-hectare redevelopment, the project is the latest completed component of OMA's master plan to transform the former Bijlmerbajes prison complex, which operated between 1978 and 2016, into a mixed-use, energy-neutral neighborhood. The completion follows that of The Jay in 2025, while a third residential building, The Cardinal, is expected to be finished in 2030.

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