Archinect - News

Manhattan’s office building spree is now ‘over,’ according to the New York Times

2023-12-29T11:49:00-05:00

Just three large office towers — of more than 500,000 square feet — are being built across New York City, with two expected to open in 2024 or 2025 and nothing else projected to go up for years. Normally, a handful of sites that size would be in various stages of construction, with at least one opening every year since 2018, according to JLL, a real estate services firm.

Due to an obvious confluence of interest rates, office vacancy records, and construction costs, the Times says Manhattan is “entering its most significant office construction drought since after the savings and loan crisis in the late 1980s and early ’90s.” Recent superlatives like BIG’s 66-story The Spiral and the Foster + Partners-led 270 Park Avenue replacement may stand as the last major realized office designs before the early 2030s. Another three proposals totaling over 3 million square feet are stuck in the approvals pipeline as of right now.

The stasis has notably led to the cancellation of the much-maligned ten-block Penn Station revitalization plan, among other significant stall-outs. A “flight” to high-quality modernized office spaces of the kind featured in 425 Park Avenue and One Vanderbilt could spark a turnaround if not for their asking price. As the report stated, some industry experts believe $200 or $300 per square foot rents might be a reality for similar buildin...

Carlo Ratti wants to remake New York into a ‘Playground City’

2023-05-15T17:09:00-04:00

Carlo Ratti and Harvard's Economics department chair Edward Glaeser recently detailed their vision of New York as a “Playground City” in an interactive opinion feature for the New York Times. The six-point plan calls for a number of radical solutions — including the widespread (but not windowless) conversion of “deep core” office buildings favored in comments by Mayor Eric Adams — and apparently has parallels to life in 17th- and 18th-century London.

“In a Playground City,” they describe, “mixed-use neighborhoods that tie life, labor and leisure together generate what the New York urbanist Jane Jacobs calls the 'sidewalk ballet,' a productive and playful dynamic in which a diversity of different users come and go at all hours.”

The plan centers on increased social interaction and a revival of street life, fueled by small businesses, green space, and recreation. They say we must “view the city as a for-profit real estate development company wholly owned by a nonprofit poverty-allevi...

Penn Station's planned redevelopment could be going nowhere for a while

2023-02-27T14:07:00-05:00

Vornado Realty Trust, the developer hoping to remake the skyline around Pennsylvania Station with a bundle of new office towers, has put the brakes on the massive redevelopment plan for now as interest rates remain high and the real estate market struggles to recover from the pandemic. Plans for the Penn site, a roughly 18 million-square-foot project that could include 10 new skyscrapers of mostly office space around the transit hub, could be delayed for at least two to three years.

Despite her recent mum on the status of the $7 billion project, the Empire State Development agency said it remains confident in New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s commitment. Vornado, which owns half of the sites included in the scheme and in January was delisted from the S&P 500, reportedly considered high lending rates and the city’s lagging return-to-office crisis as a cause for the delay.

Right now, ten office towers are planned alongside only 1,800 units of housing in an area the state controversially declared blighted in December. “We should spend those once-in-a-lifetime dollars on a 2050-type vision as opposed to a 1970s vision,” State Senator Leroy Comrie said presciently at the last update. “We need to make sure that whatever happens aboveground is actually something that will help finance the project.”

Office buildings are deploying the power of scents to lure workers back

2022-09-15T14:29:00-04:00

There’s been a surge of demand from real estate owners for pleasant fragrances to make the air a little fresher and the workplace a little more comforting and energizing [...] “Here in New York City, for example, real estate companies are interested in scenting the building itself, as opposed to just the individual tenant spaces [...] There are lots of vacant office spaces these days. So what can the real estate companies do to attract tenants?”

So-called "scent profiles" have been documented to improve productivity, avoid a phenomenon known as olfactory fatigue, and achieve a psychological familiarity helpful to marketers when developing brand recognition. This is one of many approaches companies are attempting to use in order to lure workers back into the city's emptying central business districts.

Marriott, the nation’s second-largest hotel chain, has for two decades incorporated scents into all 30 of its Bonvoy properties, and (despite the HR headaches caused by allergy risks) there is now a growing interest among heavyweight commercial clients like SHVO and CBRE looking to improve indoor air quality in the wake of the pandemic.

Allison Lobay, global account manager of Air Aroma, shared with the Commercial Observer: "Some scents are associated with improved productivity. In the office, citrus fragrances are used to energize...

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.

How does asynchronous work intersect with architectural practice?

2022-04-15T11:47:00-04:00

While speculation over what a long-term “post-pandemic workplace” may look like is often distilled into conversations about remote and hybrid working, the topic of asynchronous working garners relatively less attention. This comes despite the fact that many of the touted benefits of remote working, whether it be more accessible childcare options, fewer travel constraints, or personal appointments and commitments, would be more accurately described as benefits of an asynchronous workplace, rather than a remote or hybrid one.

As a BBC article on the subject from 2021 points out, remote working and asynchronous working are separate, standalone structures. While remote and hybrid working arrangements are simply a matter of location, asynchronous working is a matter of time, where each individual worker can structure their workday free of a typical 9–5 arrangement, rather than all employees of a company working the same synchronized hours.

Related on Archinect: An architect’s advice ...

Have your return-to-office plans changed in recent months? Let us know.

2021-08-24T08:00:00-04:00

A lot has changed since Archinect released the findings of its initial Return-to-Office survey in March this year. Responses gathered from the architecture community during the first weeks of 2021 displayed an overwhelming commitment by employers to offer an option to work remotely and/or to provide spatial changes to the work environment to protect employees that would soon return to in-person work.

Since then, a large share of the workforce has received vaccine protection against COVID-19 (while a significant share still has not), inspiring a somewhat hopeful, 'return-to-normal' atmosphere during the late Spring months. And then, there was the sudden rise of the Delta Variant since the early Summer, requiring public health officials in many parts of the country to return to stricter safety measures with direct implications on work, school, and public life.

Previously on Archinect: The Architecture Community on Return-to-Office Plans in 2021

To learn how Archinect's community of ar...

Is it time to pivot away from open office design?

2021-04-30T14:23:00-04:00

Office design has changed over the years, but perhaps one of the most infamous design trends has been the open office layout. Pitched to foster collaboration and optimize space while bringing a new modern edge to the workplace environment, corporate offices across the globe were eager to adopt this design to their office. Since its emergence, the open office concept was synonymous with start-up headquarters, Silicon Valley tech offices, new corporate offices looking to adopt a trendy new work environment for their teams, and more. However, after years of championing open office design, the team at Clive Wilkinson Architects explains why "the open office is dead."

Amber Wernick, an associate at the firm, explained to Fast Company in mid-April that the number of possibilities for appropriate office designs in 2021 increased because of the pandemic. "Once they [the public] were forced to work from home and be away from the office, I think it opened a lot of peoples' minds to what the o...

What are your return-to-office plans?

2021-01-29T13:30:00-05:00

Ever since the transition of many offices to remote work, plans and strategies on returning to the physical office have been developing. Archinect is reaching out to the community to learn about various plans on reopening the office.

Previously on Archinect: Architects share their biggest challenges transitioning to WFH

We've developed a brief survey and plan to share the results with everyone. Perhaps there will be valuable insights for us all in this study, as we prepare to move into a new chapter in our work and practice.

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You can also fill out the survey by clicking here. Alternatively, feel free to share any thoughts or remarks in the comments.