Tate Modern: Adaptive Reuse

Video for expansion

The Tate Museum took a former Electrical Plant and re-purposed it into something new and exciting, a museum, instead of tearing it down. The additions that were made almost seemed to float on or above the space, giving the main attention to the original built form.

Speechless.

This remaining piece of the Berlin Wall and the way I captured it on a cold, rainy day, just reminds me the power in which something architectural like a wall can have. How it can cut you off, make you feel trapped, or isolated. But it can also be a place for freedom of expression and art.

Transformation

Before

After

Before

After

I remember driving along this street when I was a kid, these places houses were dumps and filled with uncaring tenants. Today it is a secret little getaway in an old mill town, across from an old mill that is know a famous contemporary art museum. I find this building inspiring because these apartment buildings should have been torn down, but instead someone saw the beauty in them and the importance they played to the history of the former mill as housing.

Porches Inn

North Adams, MA

Website

Mill to Musuem

Firm

My Me' Me' use to work here making pennies when it was Sprague Electric. Today the complex has been refurbished and saved, and made into a contemporary art museum. It is great to see how a huge, abandoned complex, was able to be transformed into a museum. What does that say about existing structures? Are they really only built for one purpose?

Mass MoCA

North Adams, MA

Future of Coney Island

Video

Don't just cover it up.

I found what Mark Klopfer and his firm did on this site to be inspirational to "green ideas" and even thinking about the existing soil and how it can be kept on site and incorporated into the new design in a way the doesn't just cover up the bad or carry it away. 

Apple Art... how delicious!

Single Apples

Apples take on forms

I chose these "art forms" because they use apples for another purpose, express their colors, and makes apples into art.

Taking the old, and making it new...

Frank Gehry's Tower Records Building, 360 Newbury Street
Hard to believe this building is by Gehry, but I appreciate his reuse of the space and how it has become an icon and almost a welcome sign to Newbury Street and Boston, as you enter the Masspike Tunnel.