To walk through Prague is to notice buildings old and young or — more common these days — some combination of the two.

Consider these examples: The former Holešovice Brewery in Prague 7 that now houses a complex of trendy cafés, restaurants and upscale loft apartments; the site of the once-famous Kalupinka Bakery in Vršovice, Prague 10, which dates back to the 1920s and is now home to a computer company that specializes in cinematic imagery; and the long, squat building pressed against the Vltava River in Malá Strana, a longtime mill and now the Museum Kampa.

Finding new uses for old buildings, which experts refer to as "industrial reuse," is a worldwide environmental trend and the focus of the third annual series of exhibitions and conferences that the Czech Technical University in Prague is sponsoring later this month.

The event, Vestiges of Industry 2005, will showcase 34 buildings in Prague and the city of Kladno that date to the country's industrial heyday but which are now enjoying a second life as apartments, office buildings, galleries and eateries.

Organizers are inviting the public to visit these buildings to learn about their pasts and to see how architects have interpreted those histories and incorporated them into modern use. Supplementing these exhibits is a series of conferences throughout the month that address the possibilities, significance and difficulties involved in the conversion of industrial buildings.

Concerts and theater performances in some of these renovated buildings round out the month's program.

An exhibit focusing generally on industrial reuse opened this week at Karlín Studios in Prague. But the main program runs Sept. 19–24 at various locations. Some buildings will be open to the public through October.

"It's not so unusual a topic," says Benjamin Fragner, 60, who runs the Research Center for Industrial Heritage (vcpd.cvut.cz) at the Czech Technical University and is one of the event's key organizers.

"It's a big movement throughout Europe. The Czech Republic is just a little delayed in this field."

Finding new ways to use old buildings has been a serious topic for study and research only since the early 1990s in the Czech Republic, Fragner says, after the fall of communism left scores of large-scale factories and industrial sites abandoned. In comparison, countries such as France and Germany began considering the issue of industrial reuse in the late 1970s, when much of the West was in the grips of a fuel shortage that closed many factories and industrial sites.

Fragner's research center, in existence since 2002, collects information on abandoned buildings throughout the country and catalogs it. That work produces the materials for the exhibition.

While it's the third year that organizers have held the exhibition, Fragner says this year it is geared less to specialists — conservationists, architects, academics — and more to the general public.

"This is the first step to point the interest of the public to these sites," he says. "It is necessary to popularize this topic [of industrial reuse]. We want to show the value of these buildings."

Investors and large companies snatch up these abandoned buildings and oversee their renovations. Buildings in the exhibition — either already renovated or still undergoing work — are all recent projects dating to the late 1990s.

A program at each building will explain the journey from old use to new.

At the old Nuselský mill on Bartoškova in Prague 4, visitors can learn about its history as a grain and flour plant in the early 1900s and tour the series of modern apartments that now reside there. Or, in Holešovice, visitors can see how architects turned a series of buildings that once housed the Soda Factory and Zátka Bakery on Janovcova into modern offices.

Who will be interested in this exhibit? Fragner says more people than you might think, starting with those concerned about the environment. That's how he got interested in industrial reuse, he says. But the exhibit is also about something seemingly as simple as a building and considering its history, its story.