This title features 55 outstanding lofts from all over the world. Lofts are apartments that are generally built into former industrial buildings. They have their origins in the New York of the 1950s. At that time, artists and bohemians in search of cheap places to live and work began to move into abandoned late-nineteenth-century industrial buildings that once had been sweatshops, furniture companies, printmaker shops, warehouses, depositories, and factories. They seized to create a new American version of the Parisian artist's atelier. Nowadays, the tendency to convert warehouses and factories into homes has extended everywhere. Once low-cost living spaces for artists, often occupied illegally by students, they have grown into elegant, luxurious residences reserved for a wealthy elite. This book provides 55 lofts from all over the world, from huge industrial to small business spaces. It is rounded off with more than 600 illustrations, architectural plans and computer graphics.