Project by Yun Chen Chen
Set within the Murray Cheese Factory, this project treats adaptive reuse as a way to support the lives already rooted here. Rather than displacing industrial labor, the design builds housing and shared spaces around it, allowing work, living, and community to coexist. A narrow alley between factory buildings becomes the project’s core—transformed into a vertical passage of light, circulation, and everyday activity. Affordable homes for local workers and their families are layered above and alongside production spaces, connected through walkways, courtyards, and lightwells. Existing structures, materials, and traces of use are preserved and reworked, not erased. The project focuses on daily rituals—arriving home, resting, meeting neighbors—using modest architectural moves to imagine a more humane and continuous industrial life.
