Beyond the Box: Utilitarian Architecture Deserves Character

Drive through any industrial district at 7 AM and watch the ritual unfold. Workers stream into buildings that could house anything—or nothing. Metal-clad boxes that announce no purpose, express no character, acknowledge no human presence beyond the cars in their parking lots. We've convinced ourselves that functional buildings must be forgettable, that efficiency requires the elimination of character. But this assumption rests on a false choice—and that false choice is costing us more than we realize. At Derrington Building Studio, we see something different when we look at industrial typologies: buildings with distinct purposes that, when clearly expressed, can achieve a poetic beauty unavailable to other architectural types.