Smelting Plant 69

An Alternative to Erasure

Smelting Plant 69 challenges the conventions of adaptive reuse by proposing an inhabited industrial ruin, imagined with minimal intervention. The factory’s smelters, gantries, and corroded machinery remain — not as relics to be erased, but as active participants in the life of the new domestic environment.

Instead of refurbishing the hall into a blank container for new use, the project confronts the persistence of memory, allowing living spaces to unfold amid the residue of a lost industrial age.

The result recalls Piranesi’s haunting etchings: vast, layered spaces where distant light cuts through darkness and decay speaks as eloquently as any new construction. Smelting Plant 69 offers a model for inhabiting history without nostalgia — neither dystopian nor utopian, but possible and present.