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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.
— Los Angeles Times
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... View full entry
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. — RentCafe.com
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... View full entry
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.
— Bloomberg
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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. — RENTCafé
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... View full entry
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 Guardian
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... View full entry
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. — The New York Times
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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.
— The Art Newspaper
Goldsmiths CCA under construction. Photo via the school's website.Previously: Goldsmiths to Build Public Art Gallery View full entry
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. — Los Angeles Times
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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. — wired.com
LMN Architects' proposed Seattle tower — potentially the tallest on the West Coast — previously in the Archinect news:Seattle's proposed 101-story 4/C Tower considered as too tall by the FAAProposed Seattle Tower, designed by LMN Architects, could become the West Coast's tallest View full entry
[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.' — ny.curbed.com
Previously: Hotelier Andre Balazs to convert JFK’s historic TWA terminal into a hotel and conference center View full entry
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... View full entry
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.
— gizmodo.com
