Archinect - News

64 building owners express interest in entering NYC's Office Conversion Accelerator program

2024-05-23T14:31:00-04:00

New York City's recently launched Office Conversion Accelerator Program has drawn interest from 64 building owners in Manhattan as planning officials mull changes to help speed up the process intended to deliver 20,000 new units of housing by 2033.

The market for conversion in Lower Manhattan has thus far yielded 2,100 new units in four converted buildings, highlighted by CetraRuddy's forthcoming effort at 25 Water Street, the largest conversion project in the country.

Still, as Gothamist reports: "The office conversion plan aims to produce thousands of new apartments, but none so far will be within reach for low-income New Yorkers who bear the brunt of the city’s housing shortage."

A potential game-changer is the proposal, backed by Mayor Eric Adams, to move the eligibility of conversion permits to include buildings constructed after 1990. Most of the conversions have targeted L...

Peterson Rich Office transforms former church into an inviting new cultural center in Detroit's East Village

2024-03-12T18:18:00-04:00

The adaptive reuse design for the Shepherd Gallery and Art Center inside the new Little Village in Detroit has been revealed ahead of its public opening on May 18th.

The project from Peterson Rich Office (PRO) transformed a 110-year-old former church into a new cultural center for the local Library Street Collective, a nonprofit dedicated to presenting art in the city's revitalized heritage spaces. It was executed at 16,000 square feet and culminates in two new galleries with a small library, classrooms, and workshop included for local community endeavors.

View of the Charles McGee Legacy Park and the Shepherd. Photo by Jason Keen. Courtesy of Library Street Collective.

In terms of its interior redesign, the architects chose to place an exhibition area in the transept mezzanine while making the altar below into another gallery open for performance and public gatherings. The church's other transept now houses a curated Little Village Arts Library space from Asmaa Walton. A landscaped...

An updated study led by Gensler tracks progress of office-to-residential conversion data

2023-12-04T10:15:00-05:00

Gensler Principal Steven Paynter shares an update announcing important statistical findings related to his firm’s work surrounding the adaptive reuse and conversion of office buildings worldwide.

The data report has been updated to reflect changes in office conversions. The firm shares that an estimate of only 25% of buildings (from Gensler's original assessment) are suitable for conversion. This is a decrease from the 33% figure that was reported in January as Gensler began marketing its proprietary metric of office conversions.

The new study was expanded to cover some 1,000 buildings, an increase from their previous analysis of 300 buildings. Paynter and his team now report that conversion is "an unprecedented opportunity to create new residential stock quickly, sustainably, and at a 30% lower cost than new construction."

Previously on Archinect: Gensler Principal Steven Paynter further details office conversion algorithm in podcast sit-down

The assessment also provided some intere...

Closed school buildings offer a silver lining through adaptive reuse nationwide

2023-10-12T11:56:00-04:00

Amid the backdrop of a national trend of tumbling enrollments, brutal pandemic-era learning losses and an ongoing flight of young families from urban centers, the dilemma of how to repurpose empty schools is that many cities face. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 2,200 public schools closed from 2019 to 2022. Chicago’s experiences offer some insights into what can happen to these spaces, and the communities around them, after the students get sent home.

Lamar Johnson Collaborative Associate Principal Max Komnenich tells Bloomberg the other side to the growing problem of school closings can offer a “beacon for reinvestment” given the proper incentives.

His firm’s Aspire Center conversion took advantage of a $12.5 million TIF that’s included in the larger Community Development Grant program overseen by the Chicago Department of Planning and Development. Projects geared towards workforce development are another popular solution besides the obvious need for residential conversions. According to the website Yardi Matrix, 2.9% of all newly converted housing units were created from former school buildings nationwide in the last year alone.

Gensler Principal Steven Paynter further details office conversion algorithm in podcast sit-down

2023-08-17T14:37:00-04:00

Gensler Principal and Studio Director Steven Paynter sat down recently with financial news service Marketplace.org to detail his firm’s year-old proprietary office conversion metric, a unique tool that has become indispensable as the industry looks to position itself for the mass-scale nationwide surge in the conversion market expected for the coming decade.

Paynter had previously revealed the metric’s surprising findings that only about 30% of commercial buildings have the ideal structural prerequisites (e.g., window depth, floor plates, and ceiling heights), essentially doubling down on his original claims with added details as to the so-called “Goldilocks” zones architects look for when looking at structures for a residential conversion.

“[If] you took a typical floor plate, for example, in those the average unit size for your location or your city, it would divide that unit size by the quarter window depth, so very quickly say, OK, your unit ends up being 25 feet wide and 30 fe...

New statistics detail the coming surge in apartment conversions nationwide

2023-08-10T20:11:00-04:00

New economic reporting compiled by Yardi Matrix suggests that apartment conversions will yield 122,000 or more new units in the United States in the coming years despite a recent turndown that’s been recorded in the market since January 1st.

RentCafe has the latest data analysis to highlight a still-surging trend in the residential sector that has only mildly dampened over the last two years after reaching an apparent peak in 2019 and 2020.

There are now 45,000 units on the way across the country as a product of office-to-residential conversions. Another 10,222 conversions were completed last year, propelled by a 43% increase in hotel retrofits. A total of 3,390 of the conversions were enacted within former office buildings — representing 34% of all conversion project areas nationally.

"Market conditions that favor such projects include significant multifamily demand or government incentives, specifically aimed at promoting historic restoration efforts, the same source shows," Yard...

California becomes first U.S. state to mandate embodied carbon reduction measures

2023-08-08T16:27:00-04:00

California has become the first U.S. state to establish general code standards mandating the reduction of embodied carbon emissions in large commercial and school buildings. The decision, recently announced by the California Building Standards Commission, encompasses commercial buildings exceeding 100,000 square feet and school projects over 50,000 square feet. The regulations will take effect on July 1, 2024.

Embodied carbon represents the greenhouse gas emissions associated with building materials throughout their life cycle. This includes not only the manufacturing and transportation of these materials but also their installation, maintenance, and eventual disposal.

The recent updates were integrated into the 2022 California Green Building Standards Code. They provide three distinct compliance avenues for design experts: Reusing at least 45% of an existing structure; Using materials that adhere to specified emission limits; A performance-based approach employing a Whole Building ...

Relics of an industrial past are the key to future of affordable housing in Massachusetts

2023-07-19T11:37:00-04:00

As Massachusetts continues to suffer from a shortage of affordable housing, former mills like those in Lawrence are a bright spot. With the assistance of state and federal funding, developers have renovated and converted more than a hundred mills around the commonwealth into housing complexes in recent decades — projects that both provide much-needed homes and help revitalize post-industrial areas.

Conversions are often marketed towards high-end buyers, critics say. But the demand from young professional renters and the state’s affordable housing crunch means its stock of former textile mills are once again a vital economic cog considering their costs versus new construction and in spite of the considerable price of built-in environmental cleanups. The recent CUBE 3 conversion of the historic Riverwalk complex in Lawrence (once the largest worsted wool mill in the world) leads the field, followed by billions of dollars worth of other revitalization projects in the area that could help alleviate the need for new units which currently stands at around 175,000.

California is amending building codes to facilitate adaptive reuse

2023-07-04T11:56:00-04:00

California’s Building Standards Commission has voted to ease barriers to the safe conversion of underused existing commercial buildings. The move has been described by AIA California as “an action that simultaneously addresses the climate emergency and California’s housing crisis.”

The change will amend the California Existing Building Code, and will facilitate three options or “compliance paths” for architects to choose from in adaptive reuse: Prescriptive; Work Area; and Performance. While all three paths satisfy safety requirements, each allows designers different methodologies depending on the particular building challenge. The existing California code only allows the Prescriptive path, however.

Related on Archinect: New California building codes allow for high-rise mass timber buildings. Image: UBC Media Relations/Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Announcing the news, AIA California cited a report from RAND Corporation which found that 2300 underutilized properties across LA County could pr...

An underutilized hotel retrofit offers inside view of LA homelessness crisis

2022-12-15T14:28:00-05:00

The historic hotel, with its haunted reputation and 600 rooms, reopened in December 2021 as a privately funded permanent supportive housing project. With most of the rooms reserved specifically for those in the bottom 30% of the area’s median income, it’s open to any [...] with a government-funded voucher. Many viewed the project as a promising new model in L.A. because of its size and flexibility. And yet, a year later, two-thirds of the Cecil remains unoccupied.

The rare privately-funded $80 million conversion project for the influential Skid Row Housing Trust is one of many case studies on the issue of vacant single-room occupancy (SROs) in Los Angeles. The city housing authority’s Section 8 director thinks an absence of in-unit bathrooms and kitchenettes is to blame for the empty rooms at the Cecil, but bureaucratic hold-up and a lack of coordination between disparate agencies that serve the vulnerable is the primary factor that’s causing the project to fall short of its weekly move-in targets by 66%.

New data reveals the growing state of adaptive reuse residential conversions nationwide

2022-11-10T17:57:00-05:00

In the last two years, apartment conversions jumped by 25% compared to two years prior. More precisely, this increasingly popular real estate niche brought a total of 28,000 new rentals in 2020-2021, well above the pre-pandemic years of 2018-2019 when 22,300 apartments were brought to life through adaptive reuse.

The new data set from real estate researchers Yardi Matrix gives some additional context to the information in yesterday’s 2022 AIA Firm Survey, which said that almost half (48%) of all projects currently being pursued by U.S. firms involve the renovation, rehabilitation, extension, or preservation of existing buildings.

An analysis of the data (which only concerns residential construction) shows that adaptive reuse schemes more than doubled (10% compared to 25%) the growth rate of new apartment construction in the country since the beginning of 2018.

The figures include an unsurprising 43% jump in the conversion of office buildings into apartments between 2020-2021 and 2018-19, representing some 40% of the whole. Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia are the leading cities for the method, and thus far in 2022, Los Angeles is leading all markets with a total of 1,242 converted a...

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.

D.C. steps up office-to-residential conversions in the face of housing shortage

2022-08-09T10:00:00-04:00

Through the doldrums of America’s pandemic-triggered office downturn, the nation’s capital is quickly turning into a case study for the conversion of former commercial spaces into residential housing and mixed-use development.

The Washingtonian magazine recently did a survey of different office conversions in and around the District. Vacancy rates in the area climbed to an all-time high last quarter, and the city is predictably feeling the same housing crunch as nearly every other metropolitan area of the country.

A 2019 report from the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments indicated that the area needs to bring online at least 325,000 units before the end of the decade in order to match rising demands, making its estimated 157.9 million square feet of rentable office space a prime target for prospective developers.

The up-for-grabs Victor Building near downtown. Image courtesy Brookfield Properties.

Among the projects mentioned are PGN’s conversion of the former Peace Corp...

The 2020s are shaping up to be a banner decade for adaptive reuse projects

2021-10-11T20:06:00-04:00

For instance, by the end of this year, approximately 20,100 units in older buildings (that previously served other purposes) will be starting a new life as apartments — that’s almost double the number of apartments converted in 2020 and 2019 combined. So far, through adaptive reuse alone, this new decade has already created nearly 32,000 apartments, 41% of which are in former office buildings.

The shift to work-from-home caused by the coronavirus pandemic has also resulted in office spaces becoming one-quarter of the adaptive reuse projects that will make more than 12,000 rental units available by the end of next year.

Hospitals, hotels, and even a houseboat are among the disused buildings being transitioned to meet the ongoing demand for housing in America’s cities and larger suburbs. Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. were the top two cities for AR projects with over 3,600 conversions in the past two years combined, while Los Angeles and Cleveland are projected to take the lead in 2022.

The challenges of using office conversions as housing remedy

2020-09-28T16:22:00-04:00

Shield House is just one example of “permitted development”. It is an outcome of a government experiment in deregulation, which allows homes to be made out of old offices and shops without planning permission, that has been going on for some years. An estimated 65,000 flats have been made in this way.

The Observer's architecture critic Rowan Moore highlights in his latest Guardian piece the failed outcome of a government program that seeks to speed up the conversion of old commercial properties into residential spaces.

"The experiment has been catastrophic in several significant respects, but the government has recently decided to double down on it, expanding their policy such that office blocks may now be replaced with entirely new buildings without permission," Moore writes. "This means that undersized and badly planned and located flats can now be realised at a larger scale," adding, "this is the famous definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results – applied, with devastating effects, to the places where people live."

Conversions of existing buildings could upend America's built environment

2020-09-01T16:09:00-04:00

The pandemic is expected to drastically reshape commercial real estate, leaving thousands of vacant and underused spaces nationwide. But some developers and investors are keen to seize the chance to convert those properties into other uses.

Tom Acitelli of The New York Times investigates some of the ways in which office and commercial spaces may be rethought in coming years as conversions from previous uses facilitate a massive transformation within the American built environment on a scale that is largely without precedent.

In this shift, sagging retail spaces are being converted to e-commerce fulfillment centers while offices are being converted to housing. Because the transformation necessarily involves buildings that are already built, the shift is prompting a reconsideration of price per square foot metrics currently used to guide real estate transactions.

This digital architecture scale could solve all of your conversion issues

2018-04-18T19:04:00-04:00

The Smart Scale Ruler was created by Joanne Swisterski, an Interior Designer looking to solve scale and unit issues once and for all. This digital ruler can be customized for Architects, Designers, and Builders. Solving the common problems of out of scale drawings and differing units, this innovative new tool makes conversions simple for everyone.

Smart Scale Ruler by Joanne Swisterski.

The Smart Scale Ruler uses a long screen to display a custom ruler created by the user. This is done by inputting a physical reference of distance and the desired distance. The screen regenerates to create a ruler based on these parameters. Whatever is displayed can be converted to metric or imperial with one button. It can similarly be used to divide spaces equally for 2D drawings, and with a ratio applied for perspective drawings.

Check out how it all works:

The Smart Scale Ruler Kickstarter campaign is currently live with $40,283 pledged of their $51,722 goal. If this is a tool you would like t...

Assemble-converted Goldsmiths CCA gallery to open in September

2018-03-01T14:53:00-05:00

London gets a major new contemporary art gallery this autumn with the launch of the long-awaited Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art on 8 September. [...] Assemble, the London-based architects who won the Turner Prize in 2015, were selected in 2014 to convert former public baths and Victorian water tanks on the south London campus into the new 1,000 sq. m centre housing eight gallery spaces.

Goldsmiths CCA under construction. Photo via the school's website.

Previously: Goldsmiths to Build Public Art Gallery

Oil company proposes turning L.A. oil-drilling site into affordable housing

2017-04-12T14:06:00-04:00

Sentinel Peak Resources, which took over the roughly 1.1-acre site in December, now believes that affordable housing is the “best beneficial use” for the land [...] Neighborhood leaders said they were interested in closing and re-purposing the site, but are awaiting more details. They stressed that regardless of any plans, they still want the city to pursue their concerns about violations at the site, which Sentinel Peak Resources has so far brushed off.

According to the L.A. Times, “No official plan has been drafted and details are scant, but [L.A. City Council President Herb] Wesson said he was ‘unbelievably excited’ about the idea, arguing it could pave the way to convert other local drilling sites.”

But converting the site — which is located at 4th Avenue and Washington Boulevard across the Carson-Gore Academy of Environmental Studies — could become pricey, and state regulators “caution against building over wells, warning that even a properly plugged well can leak in the future.”

Peek inside the new Dorte Mandrup-designed Wadden Sea Centre

2017-02-07T19:51:00-05:00

The newly redesigned Wadden Sea Centre is now in full operation at the Wadden Sea National Park, Denmark's largest national park and a UNESCO-appointed heritage site. Copenhagen-based Dorte Mandrup Arkitekter, who designed the Sailing Tower in Aarhus and won the Träpriset prize for the Råå Day Care Center, was put in charge of converting and expanding the Sea Centre in 2014.

The Sea Centre lets visitors learn about the unique backstory of the surrounding landscape, which is described as a resting place for some 15 million migratory birds. Costing approximately €7.2 million (53 million DKK), the redesigned building now has 2,800 square meters of exhibition space and large glass windows to allow ample sunlight and views of the landscape.

Dorte Mandrup envisioned the building's design as “a new sculptural interpretation” rooted in the region's tradition and history — and quite literally too, in that the architects wanted the building to appear as if it had emerged from the ground.

Based ...

From housing cars to housing people: the case for designing adaptable parking garages

2016-11-09T15:57:00-05:00

LMN Architects [...] wants the tower to survive 50 to 100 years. “If that’s the case, we do need to make sure—I feel we do have have the responsibility—that if the parking uses do change, we design to be able to adapt to that change,” [...] the coming transformation to a car-free-ish future. With rideshare, bikeshare, carshare, increasing transit options, and fully automated vehicles on the horizon, cities are less eager to allocate precious space for empty, parked cars.

LMN Architects' proposed Seattle tower — potentially the tallest on the West Coast — previously in the Archinect news:

JetBlue tapped as prospective developer for JFK TWA terminal

2015-04-16T17:34:00-04:00

[JetBlue Airways] reportedly wants to get into the hotel business by partnering with New York-based hotel developer MCR Development to turn the landmarked terminal into a 500-room hotel. The deal isn't final—the parties are in 'advanced negotiations'—so things could still fall apart...The Port Authority previously chose hotelier Andre Balazs as the developer, but Balazs backed out after realizing how long the project would take. He told the [WSJ] his company had 'more interesting opportunities.'

Previously: Hotelier Andre Balazs to convert JFK’s historic TWA terminal into a hotel and conference center

BOLLES+WILSON transforms historic Hanomag ‘U-Boat Hall’ into stylish retail outlet

2013-08-29T14:45:00-04:00

Bolles+Wilson was commissioned to redesign the historic Hanomag "U-Boat Hall" into an RS+Yellow Furniture Outlet in Hanover, Germany—yet another example in the repurposing of unused industrial spaces and fusing the past with the present.

The contemporary furniture pieces and the U-Boat Hall's warehouse atmosphere are an interesting juxtaposition, and both vie for visitors' attention. Wooden flooring and bright-colored accents contrast against the rusty columns of the structure, an intended U-boat production site that halted construction in 1944. A brick wall on one side of the building's interior adds hip appeal that complements the outlet store's colorful inventory. On the other hand, the structure's original components—in addition to its enormous size—are hard to ignore, almost to the point where it becomes the main showpiece.

What do you think of B+W's redesign? Scroll down to see some images and more details.

Architecture Student Converts School Bus Into Cozy Home

2013-08-19T19:36:00-04:00

School buses are so much fun. The springy seats, the awkward-to-open windows [..]—it all hearkens back to a time in your life when you were younger, happier and worry-free. But did you ever imagine living in one? Hank Butitta did. By his last semester at architecture school, Butitta had grown weary of doing projects that only existed on paper, ones that were destined to be filed away and forgotten. He got sick of making things that nobody cared about. So what did he do? He bought a school bus.

Winner of the 2012 SLEEP European Hotel Design Award: Hotel Valentiner Hof by noa*

2013-01-07T15:44:00-05:00

At the annual SLEEP European Hotel Design Awards, the project "Hotel Valentiner Hof" in Castelrotto, Italy was recently named the 2012 winner in the category "Conversion And/Or Extension Of An Existing Hotel Building." Architects of the hotel conversion was the young firm noa*, based in Bolzano in Northern Italy.