Transforming Industrial Heritage into Climate-Resilient Cultural Spaces: Comparative Insights from Coal Drops Yard (UK) and Argo Factory (Iran)

In the face of intensifying climate challenges and rapid urban transformation, the adaptive reuse of industrial heritage offers a resilient design strategy that merges environmental performance with cultural and architectural value. This chapter examines two award-winning case studies, Coal Drops Yard in London and Argo Factory in Tehran, as transformative models that reimagine disused industrial buildings as vibrant public cultural spaces. Coal Drops Yard, originally a nineteenth-century coal distribution site, was redeveloped by Heatherwick Studio into a dynamic retail and civic hub. Its sensitive integration of new forms, material reuse, and energy-efficient strategies demonstrates how industrial heritage can support low-carbon urban regeneration. In contrast, the Argo Factory, a former 1920s brewery in Tehran, was adapted by ASA North into a contemporary art museum, applying passive environmental design and spatial reinterpretation to embed climate resilience within a culturally charged reuse process. Together, these projects illustrate how design-led adaptive reuse can align climate-responsive strategies with broader resilience objectives at the urban scale, linking environmental performance with cultural continuity and long-term urban viability. Using a cross-cultural comparative approach, the chapter analyses how adaptive reuse and design innovation strategies can operate simultaneously as a climate mitigation tool and a cultural catalyst. A six-dimensional evaluative framework is applied, supported by three emergent design values, Dynamic Performance, Structural Maturity, and Creativity, to assess how reused buildings can support long-term environmental and cultural resilience. This analysis extends beyond technical climate responses to examine how reductions in carbon and energy demand intersect with the preservation of cultural memory and the generation of long-term economic value within reused urban environments. Accordingly, adaptive reuse is treated as a driver of urban resilience, where environmental efficiency, social continuity, and long-term economic capacity are mutually reinforcing rather than isolated outcomes. The findings contribute to a global discourse on sustainable heritage transformation, offering transferable insights for policy, practice, and urban development in climate-vulnerable contexts.