Below is an extract from Adapt! Designing New Lives for Old Buildings by Hannah Lewi and Cameron Logan. Thanks to Uro Publications we have 5 copies to give away to new members of The Fifth Estate. Sign up here.
According to one estimate, there were 13 per cent fewer designated office workplaces in 2023 than in 2019 and 800 billion dollars of office-space value is at risk globally.With a significant volume of real estate in well-serviced, central locations currently unused, there has been a chorus of commentary calling for office buildings to be adapted for other uses.
Journalists and housing advocates in particular have noted that the apparent oversupply of office accommodation is inversely correlated to the situation in housing, where vacancy rates are low and rents are high. The obvious solution? Use office buildings for housing.
However, as many have noted, it seems much easier to switch to working from home than to living in an adapted office.
Conversions of offices to apartments have, of course, already been happening with the regeneration of Commercial Business Districts (CBD) and downtown city areas. It has been a planning and urban design preoccupation for some decades, often in response to economic downturns.
The “90 housing and offices” project in the Charenton-le-Pont district of Paris is a recent example. This urban rejuvenation effort has been driven by the process of adapting office accommodation into housing and resulted in the conversion of 8,000 square metres of office space into intergenerational residences consisting of 90 housing units, along with the optimisation of 2,500 square metres of office space.
American cities, including New York, have introduced zoning changes to enable the adaptation of office buildings to apartments. In lower Manhattan several well-known buildings that are listed under the city’s historic preservation ordinance, including the Woolworth Building (1913), an iconic early skyscraper, and the 50-storey art deco skyscraper at One Wall Street (1930), have been converted to apartments.
Some real estate analysts in the United States are spruiking a bright-looking future with a projected 63 per cent increase in conversion projects and over 45,000 apartments expected from office conversions. In this national survey, Los Angeles is leading the way with 700 apartments created from offices in 2022.
Nationally, 34 per cent of apartment conversions are from offices, 30 per cent from hotels and 12 per cent from factories. Projections suggest this trend will grow exponentially over the next decade in major cities, with different levels of government also looking to extend incentive schemes and demonstrate efficacy through pilot projects.
Other predictions, however, are not so sanguine. In Washington, DC, for example, just one in 20 office buildings have been identified as a possible conversion opportunity, and they remain far more expensive than new builds. And a recent Moody’s Analytics analysis of New York offices similarly found that just 3 per cent of office buildings would in fact be suitable for reuse.
The discussion in Australia has likewise developed quickly. Research by Hassell conducted in 2023 on behalf of the Property Council of Australia and the City of Melbourne argued that the transformation of empty offices in Melbourne’s CBD into mixed-use residential accommodation could potentially generate more than 12,000 new homes.
The study identified 86 buildings, all built before 1990 and representing roughly 6.5 per cent of CBD office space, that are seemingly “ripe for radical re-use”.
The proposals are not what the study’s authors, or most other observers, would regard as heritage conservation.
However, given the City of Melbourne’s recent Hoddle Grid Heritage Review, which has identified many office buildings of some historic value for local heritage overlays, the opportunities here for “elective conservation” and creative reinterpretation of these lower order historic resources into housing seems very timely.
There are already some notable examples of the reuse of older office, hotel and residential building stock in Australian cities.
In Sydney, a group of former state government office buildings on Bridge Street, including James Barnet’s Department of Lands building (1876–1891), a highly valued state-heritage-listed sandstone public building, have recently been adapted as hotels.
The modestly scaled building that served as the headquarters of Adelaide merchant John Darling was adapted into apartments in 2018 after being derelict for 20 years (see the case study in this volume).
Midtown Centre in Brisbane has repurposed two existing towers, which once housed government departments, and added seven more floors. The award-winning result is described by Fender Katsalidis (FK) architects as a “building that breathes”, introducing integral landscaping, terraces, a sky garden and an atrium.
Although not a radical reuse in terms of function, Midtown Centre offers a radical rethinking in terms of fitness for purpose by adding a greater variety of work and mixed-use spaces in the now expanded floor plates (plans).
In terms of meeting higher environmental performance measures, the redevelopment claims a 231 per cent cumulative impact reduction across all environmental indicators, and a 37 per cent reduction in CO2 compared to a demolish and new build.
In response to a significant economic downturn in Melbourne during the mid-1990s, the City of Melbourne implemented the Postcode 3000 Program, which aimed to bring much-needed residential life back to the city centre. The program included incentives, planning and regulation streamlining, and the provision of clear recycling guidelines, which enabled the successful adaptation of a number of empty office premises.
Singular examples included the 15-storey former headquarters of Manchester Unity (1932) – later Australian Unity – which was partially converted to apartments in the 1990s, and the state-heritage-listed 1940s police headquarters building on Russell Street, which was adapted for residential use in 2004.
More recent buildings constructed in the 1980s and 1990s have also been adapted, including a 12-storey office building at 442 St Kilda Rd, which was converted into 107 apartments in the 1990s during an earlier downturn in the office real estate market.
A two-stage redevelopment project designed by FK with Sibling Architecture has transformed the 1970s high-rise headquarters of Australian Unity in South Melbourne into a retirement apartment precinct with assisted-living and care facilities.
FK acknowledged the significant challenges in the project’s realisation, including major structural works that required both removing mass from north-facing elevation to allow for more natural light, and adding concrete and steel bulk in the core.
The first-stage “Grace” development won the Property Council of Australia’s National Retirement Living Award in 2021, flagging the sector’s appetite for adaptive reuse to assist in addressing the great need for delivering more options in aged care and housing.
The discussion about the apparent need to re-purpose office buildings has fired the popular imagination and become a favourite topic in the media.
However, despite some precedents and stirrings of encouragement from government, architects and those involved in the property sector, other experts have pointed to the significant impediments in using adaptation to assist housing shortages.
Of concern are medium and high-rise office buildings from the second half of the 20th century, which have particular – and, some would argue, insurmountable–problems.
Enabled by fossil fuel wealth, glass curtain-walled office towers in the international style became ubiquitous the world over.
Despite a fair degree of design nuance in the configuration of structural and façade systems, they typically aimed to appear anodyne, reflective and seamless rather than individually recognisable.
Many such façades in older Australian and American city centres are now reaching the end of their serviceable lives, and the need to retrofit has become more urgent.
Pre-war offices tended to have varied forms, including C, I and U-shaped configurations to allow for natural light and ventilation, and smaller cellular offices accessed by corridors.
Postwar buildings became ever larger, utilising open plan spaces with very deep floor plates divided by temporary partitions and accessed only by lift banks.
In general, low floor-to-ceiling height, inadequate structural capacities, uninhabitable middles and complete reliance on mechanical ventilation are potentially major impediments to adaptive reuse as housing.
Uniformly distributed air-conditioning and plumbing systems in office blocks are not amenable to differing demands placed by individual apartments that require exhaust systems for laundries and kitchens.
Similarly, meeting fire regulations, and the provision of power and connectivity, which caters for the varied rhythms of daily living as opposed to 9 am – 5 pm workplaces, also pose challenges.
Shared services like communal laundries and leisure amenities, which have been mooted in some boutique development proposals, are attractive, but the complexities remain steep on any larger scale.
One much-publicised project that has addressed exactly these challenges is 180 Water Street, New York, which was completed in 1970 and converted to housing in 2017.
Metro Loft Developers with Avinash K Malhotra Architects essentially cut a large hole out of the middle of the building to create a chunky courtyard shape.
By using some of the depth in the plan more productively, this allowed for more apartments per floor by introducing other natural sources of light and ventilation, and creating “double-loaded” corridors for easier access to each apartment.
Other conversions have opted to keep the centre of large floor plans as dead or storage space, only locating apartments to the perimeter of floors. However, this is obviously an inefficient strategy for maximising usable floor space, and can therefore compound financial risk.
In a sense, the questions raised by office-to-residential conversions have simply brought into stark relief fundamental issues common to every wave of obsolescence and adaptation in the built environment.
Can buildings built for one purpose be adapted in such a way that they provide acceptable amenity for a completely different use?
That question has always been qualified by the financial calculation, and that qualification led more and more often in the 20th century to a negative conclusion which resulted in demolition.
But as we look to rebalance the scales in favour of retention and adaptation in the 21st century, we still need to ask whether the ends justify the means. Are the social and environmental benefits real, or do they involve extravagant and irrational expenditure of resources?
The latter decades of the 20th century offer possible lessons in effectively balancing expenditure against social benefits.
This era of growing conservation sentiment was also one of fundamental restructuring of urban economies.
In advanced capitalist countries, industrial functions were pushed offshore or to the periphery of urban areas and were largely replaced by financial services and other information and creative work.
Sharon Zukin’s remarkably prescient Loft Living (1982) documented the emblematic transformation of New York’s Soho from garment manufacturing to fashionable residential and retail environment, seeing in it a wider reorganisation of work and urban space. That process involved what was at first a creative appropriation of former industrial spaces for “loft living”, which morphed into a real estate bonanza supported by local government and a willing real estate industry.
In Australia, conversions of warehouses and factories into usable residential and office spaces can be seen in areas like Fitzroy, Collingwood and Abbotsford in Melbourne; Chippendale, Ultimo and Camperdown in Sydney and increasingly in all other capitals and regional centres.
But these kinds of pre-war buildings are materially very different from newer office blocks. And adaptation has underpinned a kind of “creative class urbanism”, which has in turn been regretted by some cultural commentators and urbanists as an avatar of gentrification.
If Australian governments are serious about addressing housing shortfalls through adaptive reuse, with the byproduct of using obsolete building stock more sustainably, they need to pay careful attention not just to incentivising individual buildings to be redeveloped as comfortable places to live and work, but also to cultivating communities in city centres.
This means investing in public transport, essential services and amenities for more diverse groups of inhabitants from students to the aged, and workers to multi-generational families, all of whom need affordable homes now.
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