Whence a military installation, now an art gallery. A new adaptive reuse project from Signal Architecture + Research has transformed a one-time coastal artillery fortification in Port Townsend, Washington into an eight-acre arts compound with accommodations for studios, exhibition space, and a new artist residency called Makers Square.

The project took three of Fort Worden’s warehouse buildings currently listed on the National Register of Historic Places and remade what began a harbinger of violence into a historically sensitive space for creative expression.

The old quartermasters’ warehouse is now a gallery space complete with new double-height ceilings and a gabled roofline. Two writers’ studios occupy an expanded attic area, and the basement has been transformed into a headquarters for the local station KPTZ with the help of engineering partner Arup. The two remaining buildings became ideal canvases for new studio and education spaces and are anchored to the history of the site’s prior usage by the architect’s deliberate focus on repurposing the existing materials of the 120-year-old structures wherever possible.

Signal’s design team made this happen through an exhaustive research and discovery process that produced a comprehensive accounting of the site’s “imprint of past uses.” The result is a pleasant blend of new and old that gives new cultural form to an underappreciated (but still interesting) typology.