Beyond Taxonomy: Adaptive Reuse Phenomenographies Design Driven Research on the Reanimation of Post-Communist Industrial Ruins

Abstract

This research examines adaptive reuse within the contested terrain of post-communist industrial ruins in Romania, where heritage discourses have long overlooked production and labour-related architecture. Drawing on phenomenographic methodologies and situated design practices, the work proposes a critical and creative engagement with derelict industrial sites, reframing them not as static relics but as heterotopias—spaces of deviation imbued with complex social, political, and spatial entanglements. In response to cultural amnesia and speculative real estate pressures, the study advocates “protection through transformation,” in which adaptive reuse serves as a mode of cultural resistance and collective memory preservation. The approach diverges from conventional documentation or musealisation strategies by employing hybrid visual tools—hand drawings, video vignettes, and spatial interventions—that embrace the ambiguity and “dirty concepts” inherent in these fragile contexts. Two primary self-authored case studies, set in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu, serve as design laboratories, revealing how architectural acts of drawing, walking, and filming can produce epistemic artefacts and catalyse community re-engagement. Rather than seeking formal completion, these interventions operate within temporal and spatial voids, generating multi-scalar responses that resist reductive binaries such as old/new or use/disuse. The research contributes a methodology that positions adaptive reuse as an iterative, phenomenographic process, one that transcends taxonomic representation and disrupts prevailing preservationist narratives, while remaining deeply attentive to site specificity, historical trauma, and the evolving materialities of ruin. By merging design, history, and critical theory, this work expands the possibilities of architectural reuse, not as nostalgic reclamation or typological analysis, but as a form of spatial justice that enables sustainable transformation of existing sites and buildings endangered by predatory and invasive building practices.