Why We Should Live in Our Office Buildings

this is the Chicago Tribune Tower it was designed to be the most beautiful office building in the world but today it's called the Tribune Tower residences after its 34 floors of office space were converted to 162 residential Condominiums just this year while the numbers of this are staggering the economics of this kind of transition from office to luxury residential must have made sense here the building sold for 240 million dollars and took another 150 million for the conversion office spaces across the U.S and even the world are sitting vacant from the changing nature of work coming off of the coveted pandemic vacancy rates are as high as 20 percent Nationwide while the Tribune Tower didn't sit vacant for very long and its economic turn was driven by the changing media landscape it does preview what seems to be inevitable empty offices are decimating the commercial real estate industry it's predicted to plunge at a total of 39 percent or 454 billion dollars in the coming years according to a recent study by business professors at Columbia and NYU and this problem isn't just a challenge for individual building owners entire downtown districts are suffering too the loop seems like a shadow of itself empty offices means fewer people in the streets then this hits retail with many long-time tenants closing up shop and on and on the emptying structures are oftentimes premium well-maintained building that are in the prime of their material lifespans their physical viability and in great locations if office workers aren't coming back anytime soon repurposing these buildings as places to live makes a ton of sense that isn't always that easy though or even physically possible sometimes even if the economics work out fine the New York Times recently ran an incredible piece about the challenges that are associated with these types of conversions there are host of laws that protect folks from residential structures and layouts that could pose health or safety risks to those that live there many of these laws came about to rectify the deplorable conditions of tenement housing and ensure access to light air and Escape Routes for fire for all residences but these are not the same requirements that office Towers abide by so older Towers like the Tribune Tower with relatively small floor plates and with windows that open to let in fresh air make the conversion relatively straightforward and easy but large Office Buildings with large floor plates and inoperable Windows like say the Willis Tower just cannot be converted and while I am concerned for my adopted hometown of Chicago and the pangs of empty offices can be felt immediately and strongly in dense urban areas like this in some ways this is the kind of place that is most equipped to weather this storm I mean converting buildings like the Tribune Tower to residential made Financial sense even before the pandemic and I'm also concerned and maybe even more concerned for places where there is much less economic incentive to be able to repurpose empty Office Buildings like in much of the midwestern United States Wharton real estate Professor Joseph giorko warns us to think about the Rust Belt it may not be viable to convert anything from office to residential and this could lead to a real downward spiral in Weak office markets that don't have much natural growth to them for many Suburban locations and office Parks this might be a welcome change like the dead malls before it the generic low-grade architecture and poor urbanism coming from single-use zoning and car Centric infrastructure it won't be very missed but the benefits of office jobs for those that live there will certainly hurt but maybe they can shift to remote positions but then there's just the question of what will happen to all these structures will they be bulldozed left to rot or will they be converted to mixed use or residential if viable or possible I want to make sure that we Choose Wisely and I want to make sure that the economics and immediate Returns on investment aren't the only factors that we consider here Fox recently made a video about spending a day working in the greatest office building in the world that's the title that they gave to the SC Johnson wax headquarters which is about 60 miles north of me here in Chicago in Racine Wisconsin the conclusion that Vox came to is that the nature of work was indeed changed and that amazing architectural Explorations like Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic mushroom columns are just a fancy Zoom backdrop if they're not accommodated with the energy and the camaraderie that other people bring to you while you're working around them as someone that loves architecture for more than its ability to just provide virtual backgrounds I made the pilgrimage myself to check out if it was true and what I found was pretty strange the Frank Lloyd Wright buildings are empty the iconic research Tower where products such as raid and off were invented hasn't been a viable laboratory since the 1980s and to my surprise that admin building with all those offices awesome desks and mushroom columns was only emptied out last year while you know the building leaked the day that it opened the space is absolutely spectacular it brought notoriety to the company along with cementing the company's image as a sophisticated patron of architecture they brought Grand cultural production to a small Wisconsin town which wouldn't have been able to afford it otherwise everyone who worked in that building was moved to a new one across the parking lot and that was decidedly less iconic though it still rot with spectacle and it was designed by The Firm Gensler about two years ago SC Johnson wax is working working like a museum caretaker of these defunct cathedrals of work but of course they aren't a museum the campus is still a working corporate campus and this is wrought with contradictions as evidenced by the tracking necklaces that they make you wear as glimston vox's video but the conundrum remains corporations own some pretty amazing office structures that deserve preservation because of their contribution to culture as a whole but these buildings have transcended the status of mere real estate or marketing assets so what do you do if you've watched the show Severance its exterior scenes are filmed at a place called bellworks in reality it's much more than an office building it's a highly successful mixed-use development with some office but also retail entertainment hotel residential and Healthcare facilities it was one of interior Design's best of the Year Award winners in 2022 and it's a complete Commercial Success even if from the outside it serves as a symbol of faceless corporations on TV but it didn't start life as this real world city-like Hub in the middle of New Jersey it began as a Suburban office complex designed by Arrow serenin the same architect as the St Louis Arch and that beautiful TWA terminal it's Road between now and then has been a rocky one the original design was divided into four Pavilions of labs and offices each separated by the others with a cross-shaped atrium the internal Pavilions are linked via Sky Bridges and a perimeter walkway it received the laboratory of the Year award in 1967 but by 2007 Bell moved out and the building sat empty the company maintained the structures and trimmed its landscape but time was hard on it and Demolition and Redevelopment seemed inevitable it was listed as one of the most endangered historic sites in all of New Jersey but former employees of bell gathered together and created a Citizens group that they called preserving Holmdel the name of the campus they lobbied for the buildings to be placed on the national register of historic places and they also worked with developers to help reimagine how the buildings might be repurposed instead of bulldozed after six years of sitting empty the buildings in the site were purchased for only 27 million dollars and this successful Redevelopment began and then the rest is history but a required dedicated folks who loved those buildings to be able to make it happen and while this sounds like a unique and local case it's not as distant as you might think right on the route between me and that SC Johnson campus is a suburb called Deerfield which currently has a 101 acre corporate campus for sale it was owned by another laboratory Baxter International the campus was designed by the same firm and team at Skidmore Owings and Merrell that designed the Hancock Tower here in Chicago to justify its sale Baxter says to best meet the evolving needs of our employees Baxter's reviewing options related to our current headquarters which resigned and built in the 1970s and will pursue options for new modern and more sustainable headquarters but this is not just a generic Office Park either it was extremely well regarded as a piece of architecture there's no question about that but because of where it was it wasn't something that became part of a a Chicago narrative I mean it was in Deerfield you know one of its structures is a very significant space with a suspended roof plane that hovers like a bridge it's hung from two large mass with cables this roof is absolutely massive it's about the size of a football field all just kind of dangling in the air this feat would have been impossible if it wasn't for a clever invention it would have been very unstable if left to just what you could see from the outside the roof would swing around and sway way too much so what they did was they pulled down the roof with another set of cables on the inside this seems counterintuitive like why would you pull down on something that's hanging but it stabilizes a system so it moves only about an inch in any direction making the whole scheme viable to create a vast unbroken space underneath a single roof plane the only structure you see when you're in there are the two mass and the and the roof uh framing but everything else is wide open these kinds of cable structures were at the Forefront of innovation at the time during the 70s with folks like fry Autos experiments in Germany like the Munich Olympic complex so I think that this example really represents a breakthrough that I think deserves preservation this book case studies and retrofitting Suburbia has a ton of great examples of office Parks being turned into successful mixed-use developments I hope that whoever ends up with the Baxter campus has a copy so I guess I'm arguing that we need to assess the architectural value of our office buildings in addition to their economic and social values in times like these communities are going to need to fight for great architecture get them on historic Registries get creative with solutions that preserve and repurpose these structures while Frank Lloyd Wright's Innovative office building will likely preserved in perpetuity even if it sits empty Wright wasn't the only one innovating here architecture is more than a zoom backdrop Fox it's our culture while real estate is owned by corporations architecture is more like art that belongs to all of us sure you can make the argument that whoever owns it should be able to do whatever they want but I think that's a little bit short-sighted and it's up to us to recognize the value of our buildings and to fight for the repurposing when it makes sense this video is supported by nebula which means that you can watch my next video right now it's about habitat 67 and the benefits of pixelized housing I traveled all the way to Boston to interview the architect Moshe softy to be able to get his perspective on the subject it was a total blast nebula is a little something that I've been working on with a lot of your other favorite creators it's where I and channels like Johnny Harris not just bikes and City beautiful and dozens more upload our regular YouTube videos early and we share videos that we experiment with on topics and 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Channel: Stewart Hicks

Views: 372,258

Keywords: architecture, design, architecture student, architecture design, architecture lecture for beginners, architecture 101, architecture documentary, architecture concept, architecture theory, stewart hicks, architecture talk, urban design, chicago, office space, commercial real estate, tribune tower, frank lloyd wright

Id: imyPVFFACTk

Length: 12min 35sec (755 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 06 2023