An Exercise in Adaptive Reuse: How an Abandoned Laboratory Became Lagos’ New Creative Campus

By the time you arrive at Polygon’s new home, little about the place suggests what stood here before. Once occupied by a medical laboratory, the structure has been transformed almost beyond recognition. There are no traces of the sterile white interiors one might expect from a healthcare facility. Instead, mature mango and tropical almond trees cast shadows across brutalist concrete walls. Shipping-container doors fold open, dissolving the boundary between indoors and outdoors. Artists gather where scientists once worked. And this is precisely what makes the project remarkable.

At the height of the global pandemic, the property played an important role in Lagos’ public-health response, processing thousands of COVID-19 tests while continuing to provide routine diagnostic services to the surrounding community. Today, the same site has been transformed into a 2,000-square-metre meeting point for artists, creatives, entrepreneurs, and cultural practitioners.

Adaptive reuse has become one of the defining architectural movements of the twenty-first century. Rather than demolishing ageing buildings and starting again, architects are increasingly embracing the idea that a building need not disappear simply because its original purpose has.

The philosophy extends beyond sustainability. Existing buildings contain embodied carbon, the craftsmanship of another era and layers of memory that cannot simply be reproduced. Preserving these elements means retaining a value that no new development, however ambitious, can instantly replicate. In cities where development too often begins with total demolition, Polygon and BRSpaces make a case for a different approach.

Designed in collaboration with designer and gallerist Dare Herald of Koko Ona Design, the project brings together a series of deliberate contrasts within a singular architectural language. Monolithic concrete forms are softened by mature tropical trees that have watched over the property for decades. Steel scaffold shelving, a waffle-slab wall reinterpreted from Polygon’s first home, hand-painted stained glass, textured plaster, and exposed structural elements appear throughout the space.

Rather than competing for attention, these different materials and references sit comfortably alongside one another, giving the architecture a character that is both industrial and distinctly verdant.

“You don’t often find a property in Nigeria that answers so many questions at once,” Herald reflects. “For a 2,000-square-metre property, what’s remarkable is how intimate it still feels.” He credits much of that intimacy to the trees.

A Place Beyond Function

In 1989, American sociologist Ray Oldenburg introduced the idea of the “third place”: a social environment that exists beyond home and work. Cafés. Barbershops. Bookstores. Town squares. Places where people gather voluntarily—spaces for serendipity and belonging.

The internet changed much of that. Many of our social interactions now happen behind screens. Communities form on messaging platforms rather than around tables. Artificial intelligence promises to make even more of our lives digital.

If work no longer requires an office, and friendship no longer requires physical proximity, what becomes valuable is presence?

Polygon was conceived in anticipation of that shift. Founder Taiwo Adeyemi grew up in Ibadan, where communal courtyards were a common feature of neighbourhood life and provided natural spaces for people to meet, talk and spend time together. Those rhythms of gathering remain deeply influential.

“I’ve never believed that every meaningful interaction needs an outcome,” he says. “Some of the most important conversations I’ve had in my life were about nothing.”

That philosophy shapes the campus. There are front lawns without rigid programmes, a café that extends into the landscape, an atrium designed as much for lingering as for circulation, shaded terraces and small sit-outs.

During a tour of the campus, Adeyemi is asked what the building will primarily be used for. He pauses.

“I think people are asking the wrong question,” he says. “We’ve become accustomed to defining buildings by a single function. But the most important buildings in society have always exceeded the purpose they were designed for. Churches can become polling stations. Schools can become emergency shelters. Libraries can host performances. I can go on and on.

“Our responsibility as builders of cultural infrastructure isn’t to dictate activity; all we should do is create the conditions that allow people to make things happen. It’ll surprise you.”

A Continuity of Care

Perhaps the most extraordinary story embedded within the project belongs not to the architecture, but to one person.

During Polygon’s preview exhibition, August Visitor, one of the guests recognised the building. Years earlier, she had worked there. As a staff nurse at Gleneagles Medical Services during the COVID-19 pandemic, Ria spent her days inside the very laboratory that once occupied the site, supporting patients and helping process the relentless flow of diagnostic work that defined those years.

Today, she returns as an agency owner and product designer. The same ground that once supported her medical practice now supports her creative practice.

Few buildings are granted such poetic continuity. The architecture has changed. So has its purpose. But the grounds continue to care for people—now through creativity and culture rather than medicine.

Polygon runs entirely on solar energy, but its approach to sustainability goes beyond how the campus is powered. Perhaps its most consequential environmental decision was the choice to work with what already existed.

The result makes a broader case for how cultural spaces might be developed in Nigeria: through a more considered relationship with the buildings, landscapes and memories already around us.