Buildings converted into offices drew so many entries to this year’s AJ Retrofit & Reuse Awards that the organisers split the category in two. The Architects’ Journal said it divided adaptive reuse into office into projects under £10 million and those at £10 million and over because of the number of entries.
The AJ published the first shortlists in July 2026, covering five adaptive reuse categories out of 18 in the awards. It defines adaptive reuse as retrofit combined with a change of use.
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What made the lists
The mixed-use shortlist includes Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s V&A East Storehouse in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, which the AJ called one of the most prominent openings of the previous year. Foster + Partners’ The Whiteley and a Spitfire hangar by Ferguson Mann Architects sit alongside it.
In the smaller office bracket, Project 3 Architects made the list for reworking two Victorian market halls in Manchester. Hodder + Partners’ No 1 St Michael’s, also in Manchester, is in the bigger bracket. Gort Scott, dRMM and shedkm all appear across the office category.
The catch-all “other” list takes in stranger briefs. John Puttick Associates turned listed warehouses in Grimsby into a youth club, and Studio DERA converted a former swimming pool for Waltham Forest College. CarverHaggard is shortlisted for decarbonising a 1990s office building in Bankside.
Housing has four contenders. One is shedkm’s Zodiac, which turned a worn-out 1960s concrete complex in Croydon into 73 homes for families at risk.
Why a reuse award exists at all
The programme began as the AJ Retrofit Awards and took its current name in 2024, to cover a wider range of work from change of use to cutting whole-life carbon. More than 110 projects reached shortlists across all categories, judged by a jury of 28.
The RIBA has rewarded the same approach. Grafton Architects, with TP Bennett and Piercy & Co, stripped a 1957 office and retail block on Oxford Street back to its frame and gave it a new stone facade. RIBA Journal reported that engineers studied the old columns and foundations first, so the new facade and rooftop floors needed no strengthening. The rooftop additions are steel and cross-laminated timber. The finished Parcels Building won a 2024 RIBA London Award.
An older idea than it sounds
Converting buildings is not new. Domus points to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, a railway station that opened in 1900 and was obsolete by the 1940s, as one of the first stations turned into a museum. Tate Modern occupies the Bankside power station, built between 1947 and 1963 and shut in 1982.
Metropolis frames the practice as an alternative to a constant cycle of demolition and new building. Its examples run from Herzog & de Meuron and PBDW’s conversion of Brooklyn’s 1904 Central Power Station into an arts workshop, to Google’s New York headquarters in the former St. John’s Terminal.
