What was built back in 1897 as a purely functional industrial building already found a new use as an artist's studio after the Schlieren gasworks was shut down in the 1960s. The Zurich sculptor Jürg Altherr used the empty hall as a spacious studio for working on his sculptures. Entering the space, one immediately understands why: the light-flooded, more than 10-meter-high room with its high, narrow arched windows on three sides is, despite its rawness, more sacred space than factory building. The building is therefore of supra-municipal importance in terms of monument preservation. After Altherr's death three years ago, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Zürcher Bildhauer (AZB), which manages various rooms on the Gaswerkareal in Schlieren and rents them out to sculptors, decided to make the hall available in the future not to a single artist, but to four different artists. In addition, year-round operation should be possible. However, this will have a limited time horizon, as the right of use is only valid for the next ten years. Reuse as a design strategy These two basic requirements of structurally valuable substance and limited useful life underlie the chosen design strategy: maximum reversibility and careful use of the resources employed. The result is a project that relies almost exclusively on the reuse of building components. The wooden windows, which are hinged on the inside, come from a block edge housing estate in Zurich, the wall and ceiling construction made of wooden panels originally served a temporary railroad crossing in Winterthur, and the wooden slats were the railing of a road overpass just a few months ago. There is no shortage of high-quality components in the Zurich demolition objects. Telling stories The strategy of reuse also characterizes the expression in the finished state of construction, because the previous use remains recognizable to some extent. The white stripes of the blind guiding system from the time of the railroad crossing draw an idiosyncratic pattern on the walls of the studios. In this way, with the installation of the artists' studios, not only a new, but also several temporal levels were added to the historic building.