Just because a building no longer serves its original purpose, that doesn’t mean it deserves the wrecking ball. Sometimes it’s worth holding onto the structure and giving the space a new lease on life (and a new tenant). Here are some of our favourite building conversions:

Tropical Islands Resort sits on a former Nazi-era airbase in Krausnick, Germany.



Photos: Tropical-Islands.de

Sitting on land that was part of the Brand-Briesen Airfield, built for the Luftwaffe between 1938 and 1939, the massive hangar was constructed by German company CargoLifter as a site to build airships. CargoLifter became insolvent in 2002 and never actually managed to build a cargo ship. In 2003 it was sold to a Malaysian company that began converting the hangar into the tropical theme park.

Sticking with vacation spots, we’re also fond of Hotel Costa Verde in Costa Rica, which, as you can plainly see, is built around an old Boeing 727.

It used to rollback prices, now it rolls out shelves of books. What was once a Wal-Mart in McAllen, Texas is now a vast library. The size of more than two football fields, the McAllen Public Library is the largest single-story library in the US.

Once a house of prayer, now just a house. This Dutch chapel-turned-apartment in Utrecht comes from ZECC Architecten.

The artsy “Alcatraz hotel” in Kaiserslautern used to be a German prison. While the hotel operators are still running with the jailhouse motif, guests aren’t able to trade cartons of cigarettes for free lodging.

Built by the Ford Motor Company to transport iron ore and related materials across the Great Lakes in the 1920s, the beached Benson Ford is now a private residence on Put-in-Bay in Ohio.

These days shipping container homes are almost common place, but one of the best examples of the popular conversion project is on display in London. The aptly named Container City was devised by Urban Space Management and installed in 2001.