For Architects, Distressed Office Market Is Opportunity To Rethink The Building Of The Future

As office buildings struggle with record-high vacancies and many owners face distress, architects are attempting to find new uses for empty buildings, and they are reimagining the design of new projects to ensure they don't become obsolete. 

At Bisnow’s Architecture and Design Summit Sept. 28 at The Westin City Center, panelists discussed how today's distressed environment should fuel a shift toward greater flexibility. 

“I've been interested in this idea of what I call flex build, so buildings that can be anything over their lifetime,” Hickok Cole senior principal Yolanda Cole said at the event. “So it could be different uses in one building, or it could be an entire building of one use today and 20 years from now, it could be another."

The past few years have highlighted the enormous challenge of transforming buildings that were designed for one use into another use, specifically converting office to residential. 

The hope of turning millions of square feet of empty office buildings into places where people can live, especially given the country’s housing shortage, has been an enticing prospect for developers. But it is a task that has proven difficult. 

An August study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that just 11% of office buildings are suitable for residential conversion.

Aspects of office buildings like floor plates, plumbing systems and ceiling heights are making the road to conversion rocky. The industry is looking at this moment as a lesson for designing future buildings.

“We're in the business of commercial mixed-use. But what if we started doing hybrid buildings and planning and designing for buildings that could be easily transformed?” HKS Office Director Shantee Blain said.

HKS designed NoMa CNTR, the former site of a Greyhound bus terminal transformed into a two-building residential and hospitality development with ground-floor retail and outdoor community spaces. The firm also designed Reston Station Office Buildings 2 and 3, which consist of 390K SF of offices, 22K SF retail and a 10K SF elevated garden.

“What if we knew 10 years from now that that office building that we're building from the ground up is eventually going to become a hotel or if that hotel was going to eventually become all residential, not just residential at the top?” Blain said.

Office conversions have been few and far between, but if a number of intended uses were factored in from the beginning, the process could be a lot easier down the road, architects said.

"There are certain components or certain dimensional characteristics ... you have to deal with in order to make that work, to be more flexible so we don't find ourselves in this place again, where we purpose-built for office — commercial office — big, fat floor plates, and then suddenly, they are obsolete,” Cole said. 

Hickok Cole was behind an office-to-residential conversion in Alexandria that delivered in the summer of 2022. For the Park + Ford project, USAA Real Estate and Lowe transformed three 1980s office buildings along the I-95 corridor into 435 units and 115K SF of office.

The architecture firm has a number of other conversion projects in the works, including Willow Bridge's 1313 L St. NW, where it is turning an 84K SF office building into 222 residential units near the McPherson Metro station.

Meanwhile, it designed a partial conversion of National Geographic's headquarters that is going through the D.C. Board of Zoning Adjustment approval process, a plan that would turn the upper floors of the property into a 160-room hotel with a rooftop bar and restaurant.

“We do a lot of conversion work where it can happen, and it can only happen in a minority of office buildings,” Cole said. 

To position buildings for flexibility in the future, additional collaboration and coordination between developers, architects and specialized consultants will be vital, panelists said.

“In the Philly market, everybody wants to talk about adaptive reuse of office space to life science,” said Cerami & Associates associate principal Ryan Altschul, whose firm consults on real estate acoustic design and technology. “And there's a big difference between a slab for an office building and a slab for a lab space and what the vibration requirements are of your specific equipment and technologies.

“So what is it that we're doing to bring infrastructure expandability for the future?”