Archinect - News

A new Brookings Institution report extends solutions to America's struggling office-to-residential conversion market

2023-05-02T13:21:00-04:00

A new report published by the Brookings Institution is offering potential solutions for developers, architects, and urban planners engaged in office-to-residential conversions in the hopes of remedying the spate of downtown declines that are beginning to plague cities across the country.

Co-authors Tracy Hadden Loh, Egon Terplan, and DW Rowlands explain: “This report begins by identifying the five common arguments made by proponents for converting offices into housing. It then evaluates the myths and realities of each argument, using data from cities across the United States. It concludes with six recommendations for what cities should do about conversions and what other long-term strategies they could adopt.”

By first identifying and then debunking the critical “myths” they say predominate thinking in the market, the authors make possible a clearer path towards more informed conversion strategies. Notions that conversions are either too pricey or the key to providing solutions to a...

Provencher_Roy completes transformation of historic downtown Montreal district into pedestrian mall

2022-10-19T15:59:00-04:00

Provencher_Roy has released photos of their recently completed pedestrian redevelopment along a six-block stretch of Montreal’s heavily-trafficked Sainte-Catherine St. West commercial district just north of Ville-Marie.

The project entailed the reimagining of a busy former four-lane street into a singular pedestrian and bicycle route between De Bleury and Mansfield Streets with the help of engineering consultants CIMA +.

Image by Adrien Williams, courtesy of Provencher_Roy

The plan increased greenery in the area by a total of 46% while eliminating street parking and drastically widening the sidewalk to create a linear plaza that connects a disjointed network of squares and public monuments into one “cohesive urban landscape.”

Image by Adrien Williams, courtesy of Provencher_Roy

Modular paving was used to achieve a visual distinction between vehicular lanes and the protected pedestr...

Atlanta ranks first for most constructed downtown apartments nationwide over the last decade

2022-09-16T09:00:00-04:00

According to a new study by storage space marketplace StorageCafe, four of the top five most active downtown areas for new apartment construction are in the South, with Atlanta, Georgia ranking first for built downtown apartments over the past ten years. The city yielded over 21,500 apartments over this period.

For this study, StorageCafe assessed the downtown areas of the country’s 100 largest cities and ranked them based on the quantity of multifamily units produced over the last decade. Approximately 391,000 downtown apartments were built across these 100 cities during this time, which is 37% of the total number of multifamily units in these areas. Self-storage development has also risen as a result of this growth in downtown apartments, with Atlanta leading in self-storage space construction over the last ten years as well.

Over the past decade, Atlanta’s downtown apartment inventory increased by 50%. The city is expecting another 7,000 apartments, which are currently under con...

Zoom Town to Boom Town: North American business districts are going to evolve instead of dying off completely

2022-08-29T17:30:00-04:00

Even if the office were to go the way of the horse-drawn carriage, the neighborhoods we refer to today as downtowns would endure. Downtowns and the cities they anchor are the most adaptive and resilient of human creations The rise of remote work today won’t kill off our downtowns, but they will be forced to change once again. And with smart strategies and perseverance on the part of city leaders, real estate developers and the civic community, they can become even better than they were.

Writer Richard Florida is back with a new look at the “basic reason” behind his predicted rebound of central business districts, which he claims is an inevitability based on the historic evolution of such areas and recent building trends to convert hotels and office buildings into residential housing. Florida had previously explained that the pandemic has merely accelerated existing shifts towards remade “central connectivity districts,” and now points to a new study by the University of Toronto’s School of Cities as evidence that their rebound is (pardon me) a slam dunk.

He then predicts that suburbs will bear the brunt of the urban office exodus — in particular for knowledge workers — which in turn will remedy the “separation of life and work that was the product of the Industrial Revolution.” Florida also alluded to an interesting Gensler survey of city dwellers, which ranked office space near the bottom in terms of importance.

National Landing to garner $4 billion in transit projects

2021-01-22T11:33:00-05:00

The National Landing Business Improvement District (BID) in Northern Virginia has outlined plans for creating what it says will be the most “well-connected downtown in the country,” following its selection as home to Amazon HQ2.

According to Smart Cities Dive, National Landing BID has presented "several public-private partnership projects, with costs totaling $4 billion, that will improve transit in National Landing, outside of Washington, D.C., which encompasses parts of Virginia’s Crystal City, Pentagon City, Arlington County neighborhoods and the Potomac Yard neighborhood of Alexandria."

Does a critique of Austin's 1980s skyline hold up?

2019-12-06T12:56:00-05:00

Was Postmodernism ever popular? In 1986, at the height of the Po-Mo era, Newsweek's art and architecture critic Douglas Davis wrote a scathing review of Austin's newly built-up skyline, pinpointing his "disgust" towards the “riot of wretched excess” symbolized by the new Postmodern style buildings that filled the downtown area during that time. James Rambin of Towers provides us with a reminder of Davis' perspective, specifically regarding the One American Center, a tower designed by architects Morris-Aubry (the company merged with Dallas-based Huitt-Zollar in 2012) that is now known as 600 Congress.

Rambin shares an excerpt from Davis's 1986 critic: "By common consent, the old glass boxes were boring. But they were at least reticent. Their successors, in contrast, are often aggressively ugly, as unforgettable as bad dreams.”

One American Center now rebranded as 600 Congress. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Nearly 33 years later, however, downtown Austin and the buildings along ...

Apple store to take over historic theater in Downtown Los Angeles

2016-05-12T13:26:00-04:00

virtually all of downtown’s brokers and landlords had clamored to attract the tech giant. Only a handful of locations were said to be seriously in the running, all historic sites on Broadway. “Apple is known to do things that are outside-of-the-box and unorthodox,” said broker Gabe Kadosh of Colliers International. “It creates a bigger splash by going in a historic building.” [...] “When it becomes fully known, the pricing is going to skyrocket,” said Kadosh.

Related on Archinect:

Downtown Portland says hello to new student-designed public parklet

2015-07-09T15:01:00-04:00

The first public parklet in downtown Portland, the installation is intended to help revitalize this stretch of SW Fourth Avenue in the heart of the SoMa EcoDistrict (for “South of Market Street”), giving students, faculty, and workers from surrounding offices a place to sit and enjoy their food-cart lunches in the sunshine, rather than racing back to their desks to eat.

Downtown Portland is no stranger to green public spaces, but the recently opened Fourth Avenue Parklet has that ideal recipe for a do-good-feel-good collaborative project. Twenty-six architecture students from Portland State University spent 18 months to design and construct the parklet, which also crowdsourced $15,640 in cash and in-kind donations from the local community.

The new parklet flaunts 3,475 pounds of steel, 250 feet of repurposed escalator handrail, 768 linear feet of sustainably harvested juniper, and drought-resistant native plants. It was built as a complementary hangout spot for people to relax and enjoy their grub from the nearby diners and food-cart pod along SW Fourth Avenue in Portland's SoMa EcoDistrict.

Keep doing you, Portland.

Image via.

How Downtown LA's skyline evolved over the last half century

2015-01-08T14:08:00-05:00

For decades, L.A.'s skyscrapers have had a decidedly boxy style because of requirements that they have emergency helicopter landing pads on top. That code was changed last year, and some architecture buffs hope to see more creative designs in the future. The Times long has taken the measure of the Los Angeles skyline, as seen from the observation deck of City Hall. Here's how it has evolved

Will Zappos turn downtown Las Vegas into the next Silicon Valley?

2014-01-21T13:28:00-05:00

Late in 2011, [Zappos CEO] Hsieh became even more legendary by announcing almost larkishly that he’d be leading a $350 million effort to rejuvenate a blighted stretch of Las Vegas’ downtown […] His plan was to spend much of his own personal fortune to transform this lifeless area about a mile north of the neon blitz of the Strip into an entrepreneurial tech nirvana. [...] Doubters have no place in the ecosystem. Pragmatists stand little chance. A love of hyperbole prevails.

UA architecture students look to revitalize downtown Tucson

2012-05-31T14:49:00-04:00

For years city planners have looked at ways to revitalize downtown, now some University of Arizona architecture students may have the answer. For the past couple of years the grad students have been working on a project called "The New Old Pueblo". "We did a lot of research on successful strategies used in other cities," UA Grad Student Julia Roberts says. Roberts is one of 17 students who worked with Architecture Professor Mark Frederickson to design the plan.