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The sprawling grounds of the Tobacco Authority of Thailand’s former manufacturing center will now be a major inner-city park in Bangkok.
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The sprawling grounds of the Tobacco Authority of Thailand’s former manufacturing center will now be a major inner-city park in Bangkok.
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The sprawling grounds of the Tobacco Authority of Thailand’s former manufacturing center will now be a major inner-city park in Bangkok.
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The sprawling grounds of the Tobacco Authority of Thailand’s former manufacturing center will now be a major inner-city park in Bangkok.
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The sprawling grounds of the Tobacco Authority of Thailand’s former manufacturing center will now be a major inner-city park in Bangkok.
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The sprawling grounds of the Tobacco Authority of Thailand’s former manufacturing center will now be a major inner-city park in Bangkok.
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The town center of Kutna Hora, a UNESCO World Heritage site, where a Philip Morris factory operates from a former monastery.
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Morris Moor, a destination for the local community to work, play, eat, and drink just outside Melbourne, Australia at a former Philip Morris factory.
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Athens’ historic Public Tobacco Factory now transformed into an art center.
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Dresden’s former tobacco factory Yenidze is a stunning architectural landmark in the city center.
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The original La Tabacalera factory in Madrid, now transformed into a major cultural and social center.
Businesses change. Places change. The tobacco industry is no different. Here we look at some remarkable examples of former tobacco factories repurposed today into public spaces, art and culture venues, retail space, and even luxury apartments.
Bangkok, Thailand
A 200-acre plot of land in downtown Bangkok that housed a three-factory compound owned by the Thailand Tobacco Monopoly (now the Tobacco Authority of Thailand/TAOT) is currently being transformed into a so-called “forest park.” Scheduled for completion in early 2022, the Benjakitti Forest Park, an extension to the existing Benjakitti Park which was also built on land previously owned by TAOT, will become the city’s fourth largest public park. Costing THB 652 million (US$20 million) to transform from tobacco manufacturing to public area, Benjakitti Park includes many elevated walk-ways, lookout vistas, canals, ponds, sports areas, a bicycle track that connects to Lumpini Park (another large public park), a trade show pavilion, an amphitheater, and museums.
TAOT manufacturing operations formerly in Bangkok moved to a 220 rai (35.2 hectares) plot of land at Rojana Industrial Park in Ayutthaya, a province about an hour’s drive from Bangkok.
Moorabin, Australia
A former Philip Morris tobacco factory in Moorabin, a Melbourne suburb, was redeveloped into Morris Moor, a A$100 million business park, by property investment and development company Up Property and Connect Plus Property Solutions, a property development and advisory agency.
Up Property took over the 6.3-hectare site that was Philip Morris’ Australian base in early 2016 in a deal worth more than A$20 million, following Philip Morris closing its manufacturing operations and moving its Australian cigarette production to Korea in 2014. Instead of disregarding the site’s 60-year history and demolishing the existing eight buildings, Up Property chose to repurpose the site and transform the buildings into over 50,000 sq.m. of leasable space. Genton Architecture and Techne Architecture and Interior Design were the firms who came up with the design of the new site that was meant to celebrate and retain the original industrial architecture, stripping back subsequent additions to the original building while also creating new contemporary elements to complement the original design.
Morris Moor will be a destination for the local community to work, play, eat, and drink and features office and commercial space on the site’s periphery with retail and food and beverage space at the center. The site also has a childcare center, a co-warehousing facility, a furniture retailer, and even a Stomping Ground Brewery & Beer Hall.
Athens, Greece
Athens’ historic Public Tobacco Factory on Lenorman Street in the heart of the city is now a cultural center. Taking up an entire city block with a total area of 19,000 sq.m., the Public Tobacco Factory was constructed in 1927 using government funds for Greece’s booming cigarette manufacturing industry at the time. However, when the factory finally started operating three years later, the industry was already suffering from an international crisis and many Greek tobacco exporters were wiped out. A total of 25 tobacco companies occupied the factory in its 65 years of operation, with Sante being the last to leave in 1995.
The factory is considered a landmark that reflects Athens’ early modernist architecture and was declared a historic monument by the Greek ministry of culture in 1989. The building went through numerous lives – as a tobacco factory, a prison, a World War II air-raid shelter, a center for Romanian refugees, home to the Greek cabinet office, ministry of finance, and the Hellenic Parliament’s library and publications department. Renovating the factory cost €1 million, funded by Neon, an art foundation established in 2013 by billionaire and art collector Dimitris Daskalopoulos.
The renovated building reopened its doors this June with an art exhibition titled Portals, featuring 59 artists from 27 countries and 18 Greek artists and is scheduled to run until December 31 this year. After that the venue will be returned to the state to use as a permanent cultural center.
Dresden, Germany
Visitors to Dresden probably noticed a building that looks like a mosque clearly standing out against the Baroque and Renaissance architecture that can be seen in other buildings in Dresden’s historic old town. That building, the Yenidze, was built in 1907-1909 as a tobacco factory by Hugo Zietz who named the building after the tobacco-growing region centered around a small town called Giannitsa, whose former Turkish name is Yenidze in the former Ottoman Empire (now modern Greece).
The “Tobacco Mosque”, as the Yenidze is also known, features a unique take on oriental architecture to reflect the oriental tobacco it pro-cessed and has 600 windows of different styles, a 20-meter-high glazed dome, and chimneys masked as a minaret as back when the Yenidze was being designed it was prohibited to build factory premises that could be easily identified as factories in central Dresden.
The Yenidze was sold to a real estate fund in 1991 which initiated the restoration process ac-cording to protected heritage requirements. The Yenidze reopened in 1997 as an office building with a restaurant that has the highest deck in Dresden and a stunning 360° view of the city.
Madrid, Spain
La Tabacalera de Lavapiés probably has one of the longest histories in this list. Now a self-managed cultural and social center in Madrid, La Tabacalera’s set of buildings was an old tobacco factory first built in 1781. By 1809, the factory employed 6,000 female workers to work in its 30,000 sq.m. premises and continued to be an important employer until the privatization of the Tabacalera public tobacco monopoly in 1999. The ministry of culture took over the space but it remained largely abandoned, despite being classed as a Heritage of Cultural Interest, until around 2004 when the lo-cal community started using the space as a cultural center showcasing art as well as holding work-shops and concerts.
In 2010 the ministry signed an agreement with SCCPP, a local cultural association, to lease out the site on a yearly basis to develop the Centro Social Autogestionado La Tabacalera de Lavapiés (Autonomous Social Center La Tabacalera), using just a third of the total space available for social, cultural, and artistic activities. The center also features a community garden, patio, bar, library, a free shop, and restaurant.
Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan
The Culture Factory in the city of Sulaymaniyah turned a 60,000 sq.m. abandoned tobacco facto-ry in the city center into a hub for young artists. Sulaymaniyah was known as Kurdistan’s cultural capital and a creative hotbed for singers, artists, polymaths, and poets since its foundation in 1784 and is considered one of the most liberal cities in the country, home to different religions, ethnic, and migrant communities. The Sulaymaniyah Tobacco Factory, built in the mid-1950s, was the main source of employment and income for thousands of Kurds, producing 23-24 million packs of cigarettes per year until the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 when the factory closed down.
Various plans proposed tearing down the abandoned factory and turn it into an office building or a park, but nothing came to fruition until a non-governmental organization formed by a group of artists proposed to create the largest arts and cultural center in Iraq full of exhibitions, workshops, rec-reational areas, and a library. The NGO, called the Organization for Culture and Sustainable Development (OCSD), received US$50 million from the Kurdistan regional government for renovating the factory. However, the following years presented various challenges such as falling oil prices and the rise of the Islamic State, and the government funding was slashed to US$3 million. Nevertheless, the project moved forward. Still in its early stages, the transformation of the tobacco factory into the Culture Factory resulted in one of the original buildings being converted into an art studio and an exhibition gallery and plans to develop a national theater, cinema, galleries, a museum of fine art, an archaeological museum, teaching labs, and a dance studio.
Durham NC, Winston-Salem NC, and Charleston SC, United States
Tobacco has been an integral part of the history of Durham, NC, going all the way back to Civil War times. In 1868, John R. Green and W.T. Blackwell founded Genuine Bull Durham Smoking Tobacco. In 1874, construction on the buildings of the W.T. Blackwell & Company Factory began, and years later it was considered the largest tobacco factory in the world.
Around the same time the Blackwell factory was being built, Washington Duke expanded his business from a shed on his tobacco farm to a factory in downtown Durham. Twenty years later, in 1890, W. Duke & Sons, one of the first tobacco companies to introduce cigarette-manufacturing machines, established the American Tobacco Company, acquired the Blackwell company nine years later, and later, through mergers and purchases, gained control of the entire American tobacco industry.
In 1987, the American Tobacco Company stopped manufacturing cigarettes and the site closed down until Capitol Broadcasting Company purchased it in the early 1990s and began efforts to renovate the site, transforming it into the American Tobacco Campus while preserving the original buildings and structures on this National Historic Landmark site. Today the live-work-play campus counts Durham Bulls Athletic Park, Durham Performing Arts Cener, North Carolina Public Radio, Duke University, Burt’s Bees, and Durham YMCA as tenants along with start-up hub American Underground, event venue Bay 7, Miracle League Stadium, luxury apartments, a variety of restaurants, and more.
In Winston-Salem, also in North Carolina, a former tobacco factory has been transformed into a luxury apartment community called Plant 64 in a nod to the site’s history as one of RJ Reynolds’ oldest factories. Originally built in 1916, the facto-ry comprised five buildings totaling 39,205 sq.m.. Now, after a US$54 million redevelopment, Plant 64 offers 243 units and over 900 sq.m. retail space. The new design maintains the historical character of the buildings, incorporating old machinery and original features, while adding modern upgrades such as high ceilings and hardwood floors. High-end amenities such as a saltwater pool, outdoor theater, yoga studio, 24-hour fitness center, and basketball court are also available.
The Cigar Factory, a mixed-use property that offers office space, signature restaurants, event space, and high-end retail stores in Charleston, SC was originally a cotton mill built in 1881 which changed hands and was leased to the American Cigar Company in 1903, where RoiTan and Certified Creamo cigars were produced for the next 70 years. In 1980 the building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 2014, RoiTan Investments and Federal Capital Partners purchased the site and transformed it into the Cigar Factory.
Kutná Hora, Czech Republic
The Philip Morris factory in Kutná Hora is a slightly different story than the rest of the sites mentioned above as it is an operating tobacco factory and tobacco museum in what used to be a Cistercian monastery. The museum exhibit presents an overview of the history and current devel-opments of Philip Morris CR a.s. as well as a large collection of old cigarette packets made in Kutná Hora, as well as the company’s entire portfolio.
The Cistercian monastery was established by King Wenceslas II in the early 1300s when Kutná Hora enjoyed great wealth derived from silver mining. Cathedral of Our Lady, which is part of the monastery, is a UNESCO World Heritage site built in the High Gothic style and was the most magnificent church in the Kingdom of Bohemia. The monastery along with the cathedral were burned down by the Hussites in 1421 and were rebuilt at the turn of the 17th and 18th century in the Baroque Gothic style. However, in 1783 the monastery was deep in debt and was closed down as part of Emperor Joseph II’s religion reform. A tobacco factory was built on the site in 1812, now run by Philip Morris.