The design of offshore industrial infrastructure has historically been characterized by a land-centered perspective. However, a series of case studies off the Italian Adriatic coast have prompted a re-examination of the traditional representation of the marine environment, changing the meanings and perspectives of the space in which marine resources are extracted. This new line of research not only seeks new strategies for recycling and dismantling abandoned platforms, but above all seeks to understand how the coast and the open sea constitute an ecological and territorial continuum. Regardless of how the issue is framed, three main processes can be identified that have occurred throughout the history of marine infrastructure development. The first process concerns the expansion of land extraction processes into the marine environment. Together with the establishment of artificial soil beyond the coastal edge, the first offshore platforms triggered the occupation and transformation of the seas through the expansion of terrestrial extraction logic and processes. In the second case, artificial platform technology was functionally decommissioned and adapted for different purposes. Offshore platforms were loaded with political and territorial significance, while the same engineering technology made it possible to build extra-territorial entities by virtue of the particular political status of international waters. In the third scenario, the dismantling of abandoned offshore platforms has proven effective in providing a habitat for many marine life forms. For the purposes of this contribution, the three case studies will attempt to illustrate these approaches in the context of the Adriatic Sea: the first offshore platforms built by ENI, the case of the ‘Isola delle Rose’, and the case of the ‘Piattaforma Paguro’. Although these three scenarios have different objectives and histories (and sometimes overlap in time and space), they not only assume that a good decommissioning project must take other living beings into account, but also implicitly show that it is no longer possible to separate man-made artefacts from their surrounding environment. Furthermore, they make it clear that the dismantling project is affected by uses and temporalities that do not belong solely to extraction processes.