Warehouse Reincarnated
Part Three of Three
By Eve Kushner
Driving past warehouses recently, I felt completely blah. It's logical, I reasoned. What else can one feel in an industrial setting? But I also know that after adaptive reuse, former warehouse spaces can feel wonderful.
Take Tokyo Fish Market on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley. To create this space, Morimoto Architects of Berkeley combined the market's old warehouse and an adjacent site for car stereo installation. If that doesn't sound like a promising start, you'd never know it to see the well-lit market, where skylights draw the eye to a high, rugged wooden ceiling. According to Darren Matano of Morimoto Architects, exposing ductwork, sprinkler piping, concrete blocks and brick walls is all the rage now, so warehouse conversion is easier than 20 years ago, when clients wanted finished surfaces.
As manufacturing moves overseas, turning industrial corridors into ghost towns, warehouse adaptation has caught on vigorously. So says architect Kava Massih, who estimates that Kava Massih Architects has rehabbed at least 1 million square feet of industrial space, including the zingy Pyramid Brewery (on Gilman Street in Berkeley) and elegant Fonda (an Albany restaurant on Solano Avenue). Once, you could have had your car painted and repaired in these locations.
Massih sees financial benefits to adaptive reuse, noting that when you don't replace an entire building, it leaves more money for better finishes. This has become his "way of doing business," he says.
Adaptive reuse also saves time, says Massih, because existing buildings go through a much shorter design review process than those built from scratch. Berkeley architect David Trachtenberg agrees, saying that if a building already exists, "then hallelujah. You don't need to ask anyone's permission to put it there." In Berkeley alone, he has converted a Fourth Street warehouse into Cody's Books, an animal lab into the environmental design firm MIG and a truck depot into Addis Design Group.
Trachtenberg, Massih and Matano further value the environmental benefits of adaptive reuse. It takes energy to demolish a building, haul away the remains and produce new materials. Why throw out whatever you can reuse? Refurbishing a site means you're not sprawling out over virgin land. And when warehouse conversion involves cleaning up toxicity, that again helps the planet.
Urban renewal lifts people's spirits, too. It's easy to see this on a micro level. If I gaze at outdated materials in my office, it kills my energy and disorients me. Whenever I switch projects, I update papers on my bulletin board and books on my shelves, ensuring that those visuals align with current concerns. In the same way, abandoned industrial structures clash with modern needs, creating an uneasiness that disappears when architects invite those spaces into the 21st century.
Old transportation centers can make wonderful leaps forward; San Francisco's Ferry Building now houses a fantastic market, and for a while two Berkeley train stations became gorgeous restaurants: Santa Fe Bar and Grill (currently a Montessori) and Xanadu. Adapted structures can make great academic settings. For years I attended classes in converted farm buildings, always tickled by the spiral staircase in a former silo.
Sometimes, of course, adaptive reuse simply isn't viable. "You have to look at all sides," including demolishing the project, says Massih. Converting factories may require too big a metamorphosis, as their layouts and facilities (e.g., indifferently placed front doors, nonexistent parking spaces and inadequate infrastructures) might conflict entirely with today's needs. Bringing such places up to code can prove costly.
But old industrial buildings often have overlooked merits. In many warehouses, northern clerestory windows supply abundant, soft light. And according to Redwood City architect John Hermannsson, warehouses can have a great, uncomplicated "gutsiness." Gazing at the bow truss ceiling of his warehouse-turned-office, he said that being able to see the structure makes him feel he's in a vital space. A warehouse, he decided, can have the honest, unpretentious appeal of a barn.
Still, this doesn't entirely explain why walking into a wonderfully adapted warehouse feels thrilling. In Hermannsson's opinion, "Our senses are programmed to respond to change. Consciousness and change go together. If things don't change, we lose awareness." Adaptive reuse, then, hits us on a visceral level.
From another perspective, life is a cycle, or so we hope. After acute losses, we long for renewal. We know that naked trees will cover themselves with leaves and blossoms each spring, but human behavior tends to give us less optimism. When resourceful architects come along, creating beauty from industrial blight, it reassures us that positive change is indeed possible.
To see some of the projects mentioned, go to www.evekushner.com and choose "on building."
January 2007 Builder Architect Edition Issue