Turning Industrial Heritage into Cultural Landmarks: Adaptive Reuse and the Future of Arts Spaces

At the Therme Forum: Theatre and Architecture, Constantin Chiriac traced the unlikely journey of Fabrica de Cultură, from a former industrial site marked by Romania’s communist past to one of the defining cultural spaces of the Sibiu International Theatre Festival. His story anchored a wider conversation about heritage, imagination, funding and the responsibility of keeping cultural institutions alive.

“Theatre is the art of presence,” cultural theorist Octavian Saiu declared at the beginning of Industrial Heritage Reimagined, a panel held during the 2026 edition of the Sibiu International Performing Arts Market.

Presented as part of the Therme Forum: Theatre and Architecture, the conversation examined the relationship between performing arts and the built environment through examples spanning Paris, New York, Bucharest and Sibiu. Yet the discussion moved beyond architecture. It became an exploration of the individuals, communities and long-term commitments that allow abandoned industrial structures to acquire new meaning.

Alongside moderator Octavian Saiu, the panel brought together Constantin Chiriac, President of FITS and founder of Fabrica de Cultură; Adam Flatto, President of Park Avenue Armory in New York; Raffaella Benanti, Artistic Advisor and Project Manager at Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris; and Robert Hanea, CEO of Therme Group.

At its heart was a deceptively simple question: once an industrial building has been rescued, renovated and reopened, what makes it truly alive?

For Chiriac, the answer has never been the building alone. “What is most important is the content,” he said. Chiriac began his intervention with the personal experience of growing up under communism, when travelling outside Romania was almost impossible. The opening of borders after 1989 allowed him to discover other cultural systems, encounter artists and institutions across the world and gradually build the international relationships that would shape FITS.

When he launched the festival, with only eight performances from three countries, he could not have anticipated the scale it would eventually reach. The project grew together with Sibiu and, in many ways, forced the city to reconsider its own possibilities.

“I grew up with this city, although I was not born here, with my mind, with my body and with my soul,” Chiriac said. “I learned not to cry, not to go and ask, ‘Please, give me.’ I learned to give.”

That principle became central to the development of both the festival and the cultural infrastructure surrounding it. Rather than waiting for ideal conditions, Chiriac began constructing alliances, inviting international artists and convincing partners to believe in a city that, at the time, lacked the hotels, transport connections and performance venues expected of a major European cultural destination.

“After that, I tried to solve my problems together with all my partners in the world,” he said. “All the time, the secret was excellence, the miracle and the uniqueness of the city and of the project.”

The city’s central square offered an early indication of what Sibiu could become. International guests noticed its capacity to bring tens of thousands of people together, while the decision to move the festival towards the beginning of summer allowed public space to become an essential part of its identity.

The festival was no longer confined to traditional theatre buildings. Streets, squares, courtyards and, eventually, abandoned factories became stages.

Cultural ambition without infrastructure

The contrast between artistic ambition and existing infrastructure became particularly visible during Sibiu’s campaign for the title of European Capital of Culture. Chiriac recalled facing a jury that asked practical and uncomfortable questions: How many five-star hotels did Sibiu have? How many four-star hotels? How many flights connected the city to the rest of Europe?

The answers were hardly encouraging.

Sibiu’s cultural project therefore became more than an application for a European title. It created pressure for broader urban transformation, demonstrating that culture could generate the need for new infrastructure instead of merely benefiting from infrastructure that already existed.

“When we arrived at the European Capital of Culture, we had no infrastructure,” Chiriac said. “And I asked myself: what do we do?”

His response was to work with what the city had, including its industrial remains. Former factories offered scale, flexibility and a particular kind of dramatic intensity unavailable in conventional theatres. They also carried the difficult memory of the communist period: labour, production, control, decline and abandonment.

Faust and the discovery of a new space

The decisive moment came through Faust, Silviu Purcărete’s monumental production created with the “Radu Stanca” National Theatre of Sibiu. The performance required a scale that a conventional theatre could not provide. Chiriac and his collaborators turned towards a former industrial building, incorporating its existing architecture and traces of its previous function into the experience of the production.

For Saiu, the result is much more than an unusually large theatre venue. He described Faust as “one of the unique cultural phenomena of our time”, a performance that has remained alive because it continues to transform rather than becoming a museum piece.

The production demonstrated that an abandoned factory could become an artistic instrument. Its vastness, rough surfaces, industrial memory and capacity to move audiences physically through the performance were not obstacles to conceal. They became part of its language.

Yet the first home created for Faust proved temporary. Chiriac recalled how a potential supporter offered to acquire the building for cultural use but died before the plan could be completed. The property was subsequently bought by another owner, who announced that the former communist structures would be demolished. The site was destroyed, while the planned development failed to materialise and the ruins remained for years. The story illustrates one of the central vulnerabilities of adaptive reuse: a cultural institution may bring meaning and visibility to an industrial building without owning or controlling its future. Chiriac nevertheless continued searching for another space.

Fabrica de Cultură: architecture made meaningful by performance

The search ultimately led to the current Fabrica de Cultură, a former industrial complex covering approximately 35,000 square metres, later acquired by the Municipality of Sibiu. Its scale made it possible to accommodate productions that could not exist in conventional venues, including Faust and Metamorphoses, as well as projects associated with artists such as Eugenio Barba and international companies working across theatre traditions. The building’s importance, however, cannot be measured through square metres alone.

“We have Faust, we have Metamorphoses, we have outdoor spaces, and we have a place where Eugenio Barba performed,” Chiriac said. “But what is most important is the content.”

This distinction ran throughout the panel. Adaptive reuse is frequently described through architecture: restored façades, preserved materials, new technical systems and dramatic before-and-after images. Chiriac’s account shifted attention towards what happens after the renovation.

A cultural space becomes meaningful through artists, technicians, audiences, volunteers and the repeated act of gathering. Its future depends on programming, trust and the ability to remain necessary to its community. “The difficulty is to build something and to maintain what we are doing,” Chiriac said in his concluding remarks.

From an armory to an artistic landmark

Adam Flatto offered a parallel story from New York. Park Avenue Armory was built in the late 19th century as a private club for Civil War veterans before falling into severe disrepair under public ownership. The initial objective was simply to rescue the landmark. The mission changed when the team understood that architectural preservation required a contemporary purpose.

“We set out to save the building and create some beautiful rooms, but it had to have a purpose,” Flatto said.

The Armory’s vast drill hall, covering approximately 6,000 square metres, made it possible to present artistic projects that had no suitable home elsewhere in New York. The institution combined restoration with performance, exhibitions, opera, theatre and education.

Park Avenue Armory secured a 100-year lease from New York State for one dollar per year, in exchange for the commitment to renovate and repurpose the property. It subsequently raised close to USD 250 million, including approximately USD 170 million for restoration and USD 80 million for its endowment.

“Endowments are very important for cultural institutions,” Flatto said. “We are committed to making sure that we have the fiscal stability to create a legacy of work that can continue for many years.” His lesson closely echoed Chiriac’s: institutions that now appear inevitable were rarely inevitable at the beginning.

“Everything you see exists because one or two people decided, ‘I am going to push, and I am going to make it happen,’” Flatto said. “The status quo is always extremely powerful.”

La Villette and the freedom to imagine

Raffaella Benanti described another model of industrial transformation at La Villette, the former site of Paris’s slaughterhouses and livestock market.

The redevelopment combined preserved industrial architecture, newly constructed cultural buildings, green areas, gardens and public spaces. Today, the complex hosts institutions ranging from the Philharmonie de Paris and the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie to independent concert venues and community initiatives.

Thousands of people use the park every day, whether to attend a performance, visit an exhibition, participate in a workshop, exercise or simply have a picnic.

Grande Halle de la Villette remains one of the site’s most striking industrial structures. Its 26,000 square metres and iron-and-glass architecture allow for ambitious installations, exhibitions and site-specific performances, but the freedom offered by the space also creates significant technical and financial demands.

“We are juggling between two logics,” Benanti explained: the original spirit of large-scale experimentation and the practical need to function as a more conventional venue with a regular season and a stage.

Her closing appeal was for cultural institutions to recover the imaginative freedom that made such transformations possible in the first place. “We should allow ourselves to imagine freely,” she said, “not only to dream of new things, but to imagine totally new things.”

Building spaces for human connection

Robert Hanea placed the examples within the wider evolution of cities. Industrial-era cities, he argued, were initially organised around economic production. They later adapted to white-collar work but must now evolve again to respond to technological change, social fragmentation and the need for human connection.

“We need spaces for culture, spaces for gathering, spaces where people come together not only to fulfil an economic purpose, but to be together as humans,” he said.

Hanea described such places as “wellbeing infrastructure”: not optional amenities, but urgent and necessary environments for culture, health and social interaction.

“The future of humanity should not be decided by seven people in Silicon Valley,” he argued. “It is decided by people who build connections like this, and by cities that create spaces which bring us together and unite us.”

His final message concerned the essential condition on which institutions, partnerships and communities depend. “The currency of tomorrow is trust,” Hanea said. “It is better to have trust and perhaps be disappointed than to begin with distrust and be surprised.”

Keeping the building alive

Across the three examples, adaptive reuse emerged as something far more demanding than preserving an architectural shell. A former factory or military building may be renovated through investment, but its transformation into a cultural institution requires sustained programming, financial discipline, artistic courage and local participation.

Chiriac’s story offered the panel’s clearest demonstration of that process. Fabrica de Cultură did not emerge from ideal circumstances or from a completed urban strategy. It grew through successive losses, temporary spaces, improbable international partnerships and the refusal to allow the festival’s artistic ambitions to be limited by the infrastructure Sibiu inherited.