Buildings can stand for centuries, or even millennia. But for many buildings in the modern world—particularly the big office towers that make up much of the square footage of downtowns across the U.S.—things start to get shaky around the 50-year mark.
Designers at the architecture firm NBBJ call this the mid-life crisis of the office tower. Mechanical systems get rusty. Heating and air conditioning units crap out. Windows leak and crack. The buildings themselves remain structurally sound, but the infrastructure within them verges into obsolescence. The solution is a costly upgrade or renovation that may only slightly increase a building’s competitiveness with newer, fancier buildings.
For buildings built in the 1970s and ’80s, which represent a lot of the real estate in American business districts, their mid-life crisis is underway. Compounding that crisis is the fact that offices, writ large, are seeing demand drop and vacancy rise in the post-pandemic age of hybrid work. So what’s an aging, half empty office to do?
NBBJ has developed a playbook of architectural and programmatic interventions to help offices try to combat this unfortunately timed mid-life crisis. “We’ve got real estate developer clients who are caught in a really unique, and frankly unprecedented, challenge as their tenants are wrestling with this post-pandemic work strategy,” says Eric Phillips, who oversees NBBJ’s global commercial real estate practice. “They have to evaluate the cost of action. But they also have to evaluate the cost of inaction.”
Here are design interventions NBBJ is proposing that building owners consider, either individually or in conjunction:
Reconsidered ground floor
NBBJ suggests opening up the ground plane of the typical walled fortress office building, making it more accessible to pedestrians and adding the kinds of indoor-outdoor seating options that tenants appreciate.
Accessible roof
The often wasted space of a building’s rooftop can become an active and attractive amenity for tenants and non-tenants alike.
Green mezzanine
NBBJ’s designers propose cutting away at the facades of towers to create more opportunities for green space and outdoor access, even in high rises. One relatively simple way to accomplish this is to take a few underutilized floors in the center of a tower and convert them into partly open air patio spaces, where tenants can take a break, have lunch or even work.
Upgraded utilities
Whether by mandate or by a sense of responsibility, building owners will need to upgrade their mechanical and utility systems to meet modern standards for energy use and carbon emissions. These upgrades translate to lower costs for tenants, and additional lifespan for the buildings themselves.
Converted spaces
Office buildings can be more than just buildings full of offices. NBBJ suggests converting some underutilized office space into other uses, like residences, or amenity spaces for tenants. Owners may even consider specializing their buildings to attract individual industries by adding shared spaces that are work related, like maker spaces or fabrication labs for tech or robotics companies, or production suites and recording booths for media and entertainment companies.
Phillips notes that the firm isn’t suggesting building owners make all of these interventions, or that investing in these concepts will definitely keep a building relevant and occupied. But he does suggest that making improvements like these, even incrementally, can be part of the way building owners can stave off obsolescence. “We’re going to see a lot of opportunities where we are only dealing with the entry experience,” he says. “Others may be only looking at rooftops. Scalability has always been really important for us.”
On the plus side, repurposing a 1980s tower can take less than half the time of building a ground-up building, which can stretch five years or more. Renovating also has the benefit of retaining a central downtown location, as opposed to the likely peripheral sites that could accommodate a major new structure. And when it comes to cost, a renovation of a typical 1980s office building could cost an estimated $500 per square foot compared to more than $650 per square foot in a new building. Either way it’s a major investment, but renovations may be slightly less major.
These recommendations may also have impacts beyond the footprint of the building, according to Andrea Vanecko, a designer at NBBJ who works closely with developers on office building projects. She sees aging offices as an urban problem, with little to offer aside from increasingly empty offices high above the street. She says focus should be put on making the buildings more multi-functional, and turning them into places people would walk into even if they didn’t work there.
“We’re really looking at reinventing what mixed use and our downtowns are,” Vanecko says. “Not just office buildings with national chain stores in the base, but really taking a more active look at how to make our downtowns far more diverse and meaningful.”
She points to projects that rethink of their ground floor as a collection of small retailers and food vendors, or as places people might sit at lunch to hear live music. “It’s a bit more like a hotel lobby than an office tower lobby,” she says.
Though it’s not able to reveal the clients or any specifics, NBBJ is doing a handful of office tower interventions right now, each of which has been informed by the ideas the firm developed as it was thinking about the mid-life crisis of these buildings. None of these projects is comprehensive in terms of the range of ideas NBBJ has developed, but they also may just be the start. Each is starting with ground plane interventions, renovating lobbies and opening spaces to the outdoors.
“We’re trying to get people interested in office space again,” Vanecko says. “Even starting with the ground plane, to introduce these concepts can create a lot of diversity in downtowns and get people excited about what’s coming.”
5 ways to save office buildings before it’s too late
7
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30.05.2023
Buildings can stand for centuries, or even millennia. But for many buildings in the modern world—particularly the big office towers that make up much of the square footage of downtowns across the U.S.—things start to get shaky around the 50-year mark.
Designers at the architecture firm NBBJ call this the mid-life crisis of the office tower. Mechanical systems get rusty. Heating and air conditioning units crap out. Windows leak and crack. The buildings themselves remain structurally sound, but the infrastructure within them verges into obsolescence. The solution is a costly upgrade or renovation that may only slightly increase a building’s competitiveness with newer, fancier buildings.
For buildings built in the 1970s and ’80s, which represent a lot of the real estate in American business districts, their mid-life crisis is underway. Compounding that crisis is the fact that offices, writ large, are seeing demand drop and vacancy rise in the post-pandemic age of hybrid work. So what’s an aging, half empty office to do?
NBBJ has developed a playbook of architectural and programmatic interventions to help offices try to combat this unfortunately timed mid-life crisis. “We’ve got real estate developer clients who are caught in a really unique, and frankly unprecedented, challenge as their tenants are wrestling with this post-pandemic work strategy,” says Eric Phillips, who oversees NBBJ’s global commercial real estate practice. “They have to evaluate the cost of action. But........
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