To us creatives, the stereotype (and now, myth) of the SoHo artist's loft is perhaps the most romanticized and alluring example of repurposed space we can think of. A massive industrial space with cast-iron Roman columns holding up the soaring ceilings that accommodate our brilliant, huge paintings, which are in turn illuminated by windows the size of Volkswagens; or a gritty brick-lined cavern, with self-built elevated living rooms and plenty of space for our experimental sculptures, lit by industrial lamps whose bulbs can only be changed with the assistance of mountaineering gear.
Those days are long gone of course, as the gentrifying shock-troop artists have been bought out by guys with MBAs and children named Porter. Those lofts are now more likely to look like this:
Repurposed architecture still exists of course, just in far more boring forms--"This fried chicken place used to be a bookstore," et cetera. But we did recently stumble across one interesting art project dedicated to repurposed space: Texas-based Paho Mann's "Re-inhabited Circle Ks," which bears some explaining.
Circle K convenience stores, which still exist, were the Starbucks of decades past. They started going up in the 1950s and by the '80s, as Mann explains, "there was a location on nearly every block in cities like Phoenix, Arizona." Bankruptcy wiped many of them out in the '90s, but the architecturally-distinct structures stayed in place and were inhabited by other businesses.
Mann has mapped their Phoenix locations and documented their transformation into everything from tattoo parlors to Mexican restaurants to tuxedo rental shops, all of which you can see at the link above.
I recognize it's a massive undertaking, but I do wish he had more photographs. I'm hoping another artist will take the baton from Mann and begin documenting another phenomenon in this vein and common to rural America: The repurposed Pizza Hut.