Abandoned factories become concert halls. Slaughterhouses transform into cultural centers. Military barracks evolve into autonomous communities. Cut. Copy. Paste. documents how European counterculture has shaped, and been shaped by, the architectural spaces it inhabits.
Across thirteen European cities, this project examines the relationship between alternative cultures and their physical environments. From London's historic punk venues to Copenhagen's Christiania, Berlin's post-wall cultural landscape to Vienna's converted locomotive factory, the research investigates how communities have transformed forgotten buildings into vibrant centers of resistance and collective identity.
The findings are compiled into a nearly 300 page, DIY-style publication that mirrors the ethos of the spaces it documents, combining photography, drawings , and text. This project illuminates an architectural canon that exists in the margins of history, yet powerfully shapes urban experience– spaces where architecture itself becomes an act of resistance.
“What makes these spaces radical isn’t just their history of occupation - it’s their constant evolution. Yesterday’s factory becomes today’s concert hall becomes tomorrow’s something else entirely.” - Cultural Worker, WUK, Vienna, 2020
This project (photographs, drawings, and printed self-bound book) was exhibited in Berkeley, CA in February 2026.
Leah Altman holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning and is a current M.Arch student at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design.
In addition to being awarded the John K. Branner Traveling Fellowship, she has won UC Berkeley’s Design Excellence Award and Bakewell, Brown & Weihe Prize. Altman has been published in Yale’s architecture journal, Paprika! as well in University of Michigan’s Dimensions Journal.