Group 3 of 4
A jail, a bank, a music school, a brewery, a prison, a hospital and a factory. Six buildings, seven earlier uses, and in every case the thing worth looking at was made by whoever came first.
Boston, United States
The Charles Street Jail, built in 1851 to a cruciform plan with a central rotunda, and in use as a county jail until 1990.
The rotunda, the iron galleries running around it and the tall windows of the cross arms. The middle of the hotel is still the middle of the jail.
A guest tower behind the old building, and bars and restaurants placed on the gallery levels rather than in new rooms.
The lobby is a four-storey void with catwalks around it. You cannot spend an evening here without reading the original plan.
Amsterdam, Netherlands
A bank of 1901 by Daniel Knuttel, later the Sweelinck Conservatory — a music school that filled the building with practice rooms.
The brick and stone street front, the arched openings and the main hall the conservatory used for teaching.
A glazed roof over the courtyard and a new circulation route through it, so the old front is looked at from inside as well as from the street.
The public rooms are tall and bright and the walls are visibly older than everything standing in them.
Copenhagen, Denmark
Part of the Carlsberg brewery: solid nineteenth-century industrial buildings on the brewery site in Valby.
The load-bearing brickwork and the industrial proportions of the floors, which were never designed for bedrooms.
New window and door openings cut into the brick, and a roof terrace, so the wall itself shows where the change happened.
Thick walls, deep reveals and a district that is still visibly a brewery being turned into a neighbourhood.
Helsinki, Finland
A county prison and remand centre built in 1837 and used until 2002, inside a high perimeter wall.
The cell-block corridor with its tiers, the barrel vaults and the outer wall, which still encloses the whole property.
Rooms made by joining cells together, and a restaurant in the basement; the corridor plan was not altered.
Long, narrow, vaulted corridors and small windows. The building does not pretend to have been anything else.
Tel Aviv, Israel
A French hospital complex of the 1870s, run by nuns, with a chapel at its centre, standing at the edge of old Jaffa.
The stone hospital front, the arcaded openings and the chapel, which was retained whole inside the building.
A new residential and hotel block behind the old wing, and a lounge arranged around the kept chapel.
Two buildings of very different ages sharing a courtyard, with the older one doing all the talking.
Brooklyn, United States
A cooperage and barrel factory of 1901 on the Williamsburg waterfront, later used for light manufacturing and storage.
Heavy pine beams, cast-iron columns and the original window openings on the lower floors.
A set-back top floor in a different material, and glass in the old openings, with the frames left plain.
Rough timber overhead, concrete underfoot, and Manhattan across the water through factory-sized windows.