Industrial buildings are often given a new life through re–programming when the initial purpose of a building is defunct. Their facade often listed, but their interior re-imagined with program as the spatial generator. When seeking to understand such build-ings, we tend to focus on the representation of the facade, while the discussion of the interior spaces is often left untouched.
The Tool Factory is a project that utilizes spatial observations combined with archival research as a generator for understanding Redskapsfabrikken, an old industrial building in Nydalen, rather than a program–driven outset.
In doing so the project identifies characteristic components in the building, and uses these to develop a new set of tools for understanding the factory, that hold in them the building’s rich history and inherent logic.