5 Ways to Save Office Buildings Before It’s Too Late
Date Posted: June 1, 2023
Posted In: Ideas,
From Fast Company: Buildings can stand for centuries, or even millennia. But for many buildings in the modern world—particularly the big office towers that make up much of the square footage of downtowns across the U.S.—things start to get shaky around the 50-year mark.
Designers at the architecture firm NBBJ call this the mid-life crisis of the office tower. Mechanical systems get rusty. Heating and air conditioning units crap out. Windows leak and crack. The buildings themselves remain structurally sound, but the infrastructure within them verges into obsolescence. The solution is a costly upgrade or renovation that may only slightly increase a building’s competitiveness with newer, fancier buildings.
For buildings built in the 1970s and ’80s, which represent a lot of the real estate in American business districts, their mid-life crisis is underway. Compounding that crisis is the fact that offices, writ large, are seeing demand drop and vacancy rise in the post-pandemic age of hybrid work. So what’s an aging, half empty office to do?
NBBJ has developed a playbook of architectural and programmatic interventions to help offices try to combat this unfortunately timed mid-life crisis. “We’ve got real estate developer clients who are caught in a really unique, and frankly unprecedented, challenge as their tenants are wrestling with this post-pandemic work strategy,” says Eric Phillips, who oversees NBBJ’s global commercial real estate practice. “They have to evaluate the cost of action. But they also have to evaluate the cost of inaction.”
Here are design interventions NBBJ is proposing that building owners consider, either individually or in conjunction: