K
Klaus Philipsen
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- #1
Amazon's requirement to work from the office will not solve the problems of the American downtown that blew up with Covid, the need for cities as places of interaction and innovation notwithstanding.
The issue isn't "the city" but the American Downtown
Brandes is right, innovation is a socially dependent activity but misses the issue at hand. The future of cities is not in question but the future of the American downtown is. As it is explained in Downtown: A Short History of American Urban Exceptionalism, the American downtown is not the same as centre-ville, Innenstadt or centro historico in France, Germany or Italy respectively. It didn't start of ancient ruins, had no protective walls and no particularly high density. It eventually morphed into what became a term for cities core areas worldwide, namely a bunch of office towers forming a "financial district" or the "central Business District". Even US cities that have lots of space or are not particularly big adopted this "Manhattan model" in rather generic versions of towers which deprive the streets of sunlight and empty out after five pm.
The towers make an impressive skyline from afar. This American invention originated in New York and Chicago who first dueled for the world's tallest tower and then had to concede the record to Shanghai and Dubai. This version of a city center needed the invention of the elevator and steel construction, but it wasn't inevitable and is far from universal, even though cities have adopted it in distant places such as Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia and even Russia.
The American downtown became progressively more a monoculture. Initially a walkable hub of many functions the onset of the automobile made it ceded first residents and then shopping to the suburbs. Even the office made an appearance in the suburbs as an office park
This hasn't stopped the proliferation of the downtown office in most US cities until Covid hit. The shape of the tower, its conglomeration in downtown, and the continued growth were never the result of reason but the product of vanity, power, foreign investment and speculation.
A failure in form and function
It is noteworthy that under many common sense metrics the office tower is a failure a a building type and made the downtown dominated by it a failure of urban planning as well. The taller buildings are, the more expensive to build they become. In most cases the height is not justified by the scarcity or cost of land. In fact there was so much land available that many early downtowns featured towers standing surrounded by low parking garages or even surface lots. Ironically, towers have a large energy footprint, whether we look at embedded or operational energy. They are socially and physically isolating. Their vertical elevator transportation is far less interactive than walking on a sidewalk. Conceived as monocultures, office towers are economically vulnerable.
Office towers make a good skyline but not a good city. The spaces around them are windswept, inhospitable plazas that usually lack the qualities of good place-making. The sum total of the towers is incoherent assortment of sculptural elements trying to outdo each other. There are exceptions that compensate the tower problem with six-story plinths that create a streetscape reminiscent of Paris with the towers sitting set back on top of this urban base. Vancouver has tried this with some success for residential towers. The separation of uses into separate far-flung segments of the city has long been identified as the chief destructor of urbanity and chief culprit for a very high demand on mobility taxing any transportation system, especially one relying on the automobile and on urban streets that usually can't be widened. This hampers again hampers the regeneration of the American style downtown as the debate around New York's congestion pricing shows and generates a vicious cycle in which sprawl disabled transit and lengthened commutes forcing downtown to become car friendly, in turn deadening it further.
Covid brought the reckoning. The American style downtown has mutated from international copied model to sick patient. The climate crisis will compound the problems.
The downtown doom loop
New office construction amounted to about 68 million sq ft in 2019 and has shrunk since then by an estimated 37%. Whatever new offices are built in the weaker markets are high end class A offices that reflect many of the amenities folks now consider necessary to attract tenants and their employees. While there will be probably always a need for offices, they have to look different than they did in the age of the cubicle. Especially office towers of the 1960s, 70s vintage have lost their appeal.
It isn't just the remote work option that makes a return to the cubicle unattractive, technological advance reduced the space need per worker, just consider the demise of all the paper filing cabinets, the demise of main-frame computers and the mobility of electronic user interfaces. The use of robots and artificial intelligence will sweep through the remaining office workforce like an iron broom and reduce the need for office space further. In short, the office tower with its cubicles spread out across vast floorplates has become a dinosaur that defies necessary adaptation.
To what degree the once modern towers became stranded assets is illustrated by a 28 story Baltimore office tower that is only slightly more than half occupied. In November 2024 it sold at auction for a tenth of the price that was paid for it 10 years ago.
The doom loop of these office dinosaurs engulfs the entire concept of downtown. Empty offices beget empty coffee shops, drycleaners, flower shops, lunch counters and after work bars. Taxes dry up, the streets become first empty, then gritty and eventually dangerous.
Mixed Use
If cities have a bright future as centers of innovation, culture and commerce where ever larger percentages of the population live, globally and nationally, the metro regions overall should have the means and the need of having hospitable, sustainable and attractive centers that provide identity and a commons for the region. But this has to be wanted, planned and implemented. Let's review a few popular solutions most commonly offered.
For an answer to the office glut and the resulting doom loop most planners look to the past and suggest a return to the shape and mix of uses of central cities that were common before the tower studded financial districts took over. The suggestion to create more "mixed use" is certainly not new and downtowns have for decades added residences back in with the objective of being lively after regular work hours. However, where office towers cover 80-90% of downtown real estate, residential use relies on office conversion. That is not only costly and challenging but results in fewer people since many more office workers used to be on the same area that a single apartment will occupy. Thus, apartments alone will not revive retail, restaurants and bars.
Unfortunately a mixed use downtown wouldn't even solve a transportation problem. Shortening the long commute to work or the travel needed to cover life's needs looks like a solution. In practice, though, America overall is far too car dependent for a life without a car except where there is really good transit which is rare. As a result even mixed use requires lots of parking. Downtowns which are clogged with parked or moving cars defy most efforts of downtown boosters and business improvement districts (BIDs).Alleviating the dullness of financial district streets through streetscaping amounts to not much more than putting lipstick on a pig.
Office conversion faces many regulatory hurdles. Building codes, zoning codes, daylighting, ventilation, energy codes present sizeable challenges when we don't more of the older office buildings with smaller floor plates, solid walls and punched out windows. The high cost of conversion can be offset by the ongoing nationwide demand for housing across all market segments that continues to make developing housing lucrative for developers, while it makes it unaffordable for buyers and renters. Nationwide the housing vacancy is less than 1/3 of the office vacancy. But with the low hanging conversion fruits pretty much gone, office conversion may still not practical. Gensler Architects has developed a conversion tool to show investors, owners and developers whether a building is suitable for conversion. It turns out that the office buildings that are the least leasable are also the hardest to convert. They become Stranded assets and a burden not only to their owners but also to their downtown unless they get demolished or the rare opportunity for a different use than housing or office opens up. As in the case of obsolete industrial buildings, artists and start up experimenters come to mind, even though those old offices are far less flexible and attractive than former lofts and mills.
A complete reorientation
There is no silver bullet. The solutions for the American downtown monoculture lie in a comprehensive reversal of the underlying causes for the current problems:
Good solutions have to include all or most of these aspects by finding better building types and better urban design solutions with mixed uses, experiential work spaces with less floor area per person (potentially undesignated spaces), family support services at or near the work space and catering to industries that will have a future after AI has reduced the service work force. Adding more housing to downtowns will remain a viable solution as long as it is understood that true mixed use includes also full integration of education, entertainment, sports, shopping, making things, and simply hanging out in a way that doesn't relegate each of those functions to different campuses or islands.
There are examples of new style office that offer the experience young office workers are looking for. The new Apple campus by Foster & Partners shows that a modern office building doesn't have to be tall and can be resilient and sustainable.
But this design is suburban, insular and inward looking. The best sustainable office towers are located abroad: The Edge in Amsterdam, barely a real tower and also not located downtown, the RB12 in Rio de Janeiro, sustainable, a small tower and in downtown, the literally green buildings by WOHA in Singapore, or the Torre Reforma in Mexico City, tall, urban and centrally located.
The area where Torre Reforma is located would represent pretty well the idea of a new downtown in which all the aspects of urbanity are united, it is mixed use, sustainable, sits on a beautiful boulevard, has good public transportation, respects its surroundings and even integrates a historic structure that stood on this site for a long time. The area has open spaces, parks, monuments, museums, restaurants and a vital street life and represents one of several public commons this vast city features. There are a few additional towers in that section but they are not the dominating and overpowering feature they are in Manhattan.
The rejiggering of American downtowns so they will address all the current problems may use Mexico City, Rotterdam or Frankfurt as examples. All of those cities have embraced office towers but have so far integrated them fairly successfully into their urban fabric that never descended to being simply a monoculture of offices.
The reinvention of the American downtown, however, must be more than a copy. Once again it must be something new reshaping the physical form of buildings and cities alike and it needs to different for each city.
This should be a welcome challenge to the profession of architects and planners. It is an exciting prospect to envision a new American downtown that is no longer just the result of deal making and speculation. One that is neither frozen in the past, nor a replica of it, but an expression of a future in which one use and one type of work no longer dominates and which is an expression of a specific local culture and history.
The new downtown needs to be beautiful not only from afar as a skyline but also close up. Placemaking requires centers. The center of a city needs to be the true commons of the city in which the full diversity of people, work and culture will be represented.
Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
Also on this blog: The Future of Cities - Back to Basics?
Related materials:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/...ing-and-what-can-really-revitalize-downtowns/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/01/upshot/american-cities-office-conversion.html
https://www.lincolninst.edu/publica...fice-residential-conversions-are-on-the-rise/
https://www.bizjournals.com/baltimo...1-n-charles-office-downtown-auction-sale.html
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/new...ons-across-the-us-arlington-cleveland/708197/
The issue isn't "the city" but the American Downtown
Brandes is right, innovation is a socially dependent activity but misses the issue at hand. The future of cities is not in question but the future of the American downtown is. As it is explained in Downtown: A Short History of American Urban Exceptionalism, the American downtown is not the same as centre-ville, Innenstadt or centro historico in France, Germany or Italy respectively. It didn't start of ancient ruins, had no protective walls and no particularly high density. It eventually morphed into what became a term for cities core areas worldwide, namely a bunch of office towers forming a "financial district" or the "central Business District". Even US cities that have lots of space or are not particularly big adopted this "Manhattan model" in rather generic versions of towers which deprive the streets of sunlight and empty out after five pm.
[td]
[/td]
[td]
Manhattan skyline: A model for downtown? (Photo Philipsen)
[/td]
The towers make an impressive skyline from afar. This American invention originated in New York and Chicago who first dueled for the world's tallest tower and then had to concede the record to Shanghai and Dubai. This version of a city center needed the invention of the elevator and steel construction, but it wasn't inevitable and is far from universal, even though cities have adopted it in distant places such as Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia and even Russia.
[td]
[/td]
[td]
Downtown Boston: 85% office use
[/td]The American downtown became progressively more a monoculture. Initially a walkable hub of many functions the onset of the automobile made it ceded first residents and then shopping to the suburbs. Even the office made an appearance in the suburbs as an office park
This hasn't stopped the proliferation of the downtown office in most US cities until Covid hit. The shape of the tower, its conglomeration in downtown, and the continued growth were never the result of reason but the product of vanity, power, foreign investment and speculation.
A failure in form and function
It is noteworthy that under many common sense metrics the office tower is a failure a a building type and made the downtown dominated by it a failure of urban planning as well. The taller buildings are, the more expensive to build they become. In most cases the height is not justified by the scarcity or cost of land. In fact there was so much land available that many early downtowns featured towers standing surrounded by low parking garages or even surface lots. Ironically, towers have a large energy footprint, whether we look at embedded or operational energy. They are socially and physically isolating. Their vertical elevator transportation is far less interactive than walking on a sidewalk. Conceived as monocultures, office towers are economically vulnerable.
[td]
[/td]
[td]
Empty windswept plazas among mono-functional office towers
(Photo Philipsen)
[/td](Photo Philipsen)
Office towers make a good skyline but not a good city. The spaces around them are windswept, inhospitable plazas that usually lack the qualities of good place-making. The sum total of the towers is incoherent assortment of sculptural elements trying to outdo each other. There are exceptions that compensate the tower problem with six-story plinths that create a streetscape reminiscent of Paris with the towers sitting set back on top of this urban base. Vancouver has tried this with some success for residential towers. The separation of uses into separate far-flung segments of the city has long been identified as the chief destructor of urbanity and chief culprit for a very high demand on mobility taxing any transportation system, especially one relying on the automobile and on urban streets that usually can't be widened. This hampers again hampers the regeneration of the American style downtown as the debate around New York's congestion pricing shows and generates a vicious cycle in which sprawl disabled transit and lengthened commutes forcing downtown to become car friendly, in turn deadening it further.
Covid brought the reckoning. The American style downtown has mutated from international copied model to sick patient. The climate crisis will compound the problems.
[td]
[/td]
[td]
Dark streets, devoid of green: Manhattan street
(Photo Philipsen)
[/td](Photo Philipsen)
- The national vacancy rate reached 19.4% at the end of October, an increase of 160 basis points year-over-year
- High vacancies persist in most office markets, with San Francisco and Austin recording the highest rate nationally at 27.7%, followed by the Bay Area (26.4%), Seattle (25.8%) and Denver (24.6%)
- Under-construction office space totaled 60.8 million square feet nationwide, with 8.5 million square feet breaking ground in 2024 and 43.9 million square feet being completed through October (Commercial Edge Report Nov 2024)
The downtown doom loop
New office construction amounted to about 68 million sq ft in 2019 and has shrunk since then by an estimated 37%. Whatever new offices are built in the weaker markets are high end class A offices that reflect many of the amenities folks now consider necessary to attract tenants and their employees. While there will be probably always a need for offices, they have to look different than they did in the age of the cubicle. Especially office towers of the 1960s, 70s vintage have lost their appeal.
It isn't just the remote work option that makes a return to the cubicle unattractive, technological advance reduced the space need per worker, just consider the demise of all the paper filing cabinets, the demise of main-frame computers and the mobility of electronic user interfaces. The use of robots and artificial intelligence will sweep through the remaining office workforce like an iron broom and reduce the need for office space further. In short, the office tower with its cubicles spread out across vast floorplates has become a dinosaur that defies necessary adaptation.
To what degree the once modern towers became stranded assets is illustrated by a 28 story Baltimore office tower that is only slightly more than half occupied. In November 2024 it sold at auction for a tenth of the price that was paid for it 10 years ago.
The doom loop of these office dinosaurs engulfs the entire concept of downtown. Empty offices beget empty coffee shops, drycleaners, flower shops, lunch counters and after work bars. Taxes dry up, the streets become first empty, then gritty and eventually dangerous.
Mixed Use
If cities have a bright future as centers of innovation, culture and commerce where ever larger percentages of the population live, globally and nationally, the metro regions overall should have the means and the need of having hospitable, sustainable and attractive centers that provide identity and a commons for the region. But this has to be wanted, planned and implemented. Let's review a few popular solutions most commonly offered.
[td]
[/td]
[td]
Tall, taller, tallest. The record went abroad
[/td]For an answer to the office glut and the resulting doom loop most planners look to the past and suggest a return to the shape and mix of uses of central cities that were common before the tower studded financial districts took over. The suggestion to create more "mixed use" is certainly not new and downtowns have for decades added residences back in with the objective of being lively after regular work hours. However, where office towers cover 80-90% of downtown real estate, residential use relies on office conversion. That is not only costly and challenging but results in fewer people since many more office workers used to be on the same area that a single apartment will occupy. Thus, apartments alone will not revive retail, restaurants and bars.
Unfortunately a mixed use downtown wouldn't even solve a transportation problem. Shortening the long commute to work or the travel needed to cover life's needs looks like a solution. In practice, though, America overall is far too car dependent for a life without a car except where there is really good transit which is rare. As a result even mixed use requires lots of parking. Downtowns which are clogged with parked or moving cars defy most efforts of downtown boosters and business improvement districts (BIDs).Alleviating the dullness of financial district streets through streetscaping amounts to not much more than putting lipstick on a pig.
[td]
[/td]
[td]
The misery of a downtown dominated by parking (Photo: Philipsen)
[/td]Office conversion faces many regulatory hurdles. Building codes, zoning codes, daylighting, ventilation, energy codes present sizeable challenges when we don't more of the older office buildings with smaller floor plates, solid walls and punched out windows. The high cost of conversion can be offset by the ongoing nationwide demand for housing across all market segments that continues to make developing housing lucrative for developers, while it makes it unaffordable for buyers and renters. Nationwide the housing vacancy is less than 1/3 of the office vacancy. But with the low hanging conversion fruits pretty much gone, office conversion may still not practical. Gensler Architects has developed a conversion tool to show investors, owners and developers whether a building is suitable for conversion. It turns out that the office buildings that are the least leasable are also the hardest to convert. They become Stranded assets and a burden not only to their owners but also to their downtown unless they get demolished or the rare opportunity for a different use than housing or office opens up. As in the case of obsolete industrial buildings, artists and start up experimenters come to mind, even though those old offices are far less flexible and attractive than former lofts and mills.
A complete reorientation
There is no silver bullet. The solutions for the American downtown monoculture lie in a comprehensive reversal of the underlying causes for the current problems:
- Office buildings need to become more economical, resilient and ecological to construct and maintain
- Monocultures of one dominant use (office) need to be replaced with a multitude of uses
- The work experience need to be much improved over seventies style cubicle offices on large floors and include entertainment, services and the flexibility to adjust for developing technology
- New offices need to offer less space per person and also allow for hybrid work models with work stations used by several different people over the course of a week or month
- New downtowns need to allow for better integration of family and private life
- New downtown planning needs to prepare for further reductions of office work due to AI
- Downtown planning needs to include social interaction, third places and the accessory uses for live and work and offer safety in to the threats of climate change.
- The new downtowns need to accommodate other types of workplaces than offices or traditional services.[td][/td]
[td]Torre Reforma, CDMC (via Schindler)[/td] - The new downtowns need to be multi-modal and far less car dependent even if the new cars will be electric, shared and self driving.
Good solutions have to include all or most of these aspects by finding better building types and better urban design solutions with mixed uses, experiential work spaces with less floor area per person (potentially undesignated spaces), family support services at or near the work space and catering to industries that will have a future after AI has reduced the service work force. Adding more housing to downtowns will remain a viable solution as long as it is understood that true mixed use includes also full integration of education, entertainment, sports, shopping, making things, and simply hanging out in a way that doesn't relegate each of those functions to different campuses or islands.
There are examples of new style office that offer the experience young office workers are looking for. The new Apple campus by Foster & Partners shows that a modern office building doesn't have to be tall and can be resilient and sustainable.
[td]
[/td]
[td]
Parkroyal on Pickering, Singapore (Photo: WOHA)
[/td]But this design is suburban, insular and inward looking. The best sustainable office towers are located abroad: The Edge in Amsterdam, barely a real tower and also not located downtown, the RB12 in Rio de Janeiro, sustainable, a small tower and in downtown, the literally green buildings by WOHA in Singapore, or the Torre Reforma in Mexico City, tall, urban and centrally located.
The area where Torre Reforma is located would represent pretty well the idea of a new downtown in which all the aspects of urbanity are united, it is mixed use, sustainable, sits on a beautiful boulevard, has good public transportation, respects its surroundings and even integrates a historic structure that stood on this site for a long time. The area has open spaces, parks, monuments, museums, restaurants and a vital street life and represents one of several public commons this vast city features. There are a few additional towers in that section but they are not the dominating and overpowering feature they are in Manhattan.
[td]
[/td]
[td]
Torre Reforma, Mexico City (Photo via Schindler)
[/td]The rejiggering of American downtowns so they will address all the current problems may use Mexico City, Rotterdam or Frankfurt as examples. All of those cities have embraced office towers but have so far integrated them fairly successfully into their urban fabric that never descended to being simply a monoculture of offices.
The reinvention of the American downtown, however, must be more than a copy. Once again it must be something new reshaping the physical form of buildings and cities alike and it needs to different for each city.
This should be a welcome challenge to the profession of architects and planners. It is an exciting prospect to envision a new American downtown that is no longer just the result of deal making and speculation. One that is neither frozen in the past, nor a replica of it, but an expression of a future in which one use and one type of work no longer dominates and which is an expression of a specific local culture and history.
The new downtown needs to be beautiful not only from afar as a skyline but also close up. Placemaking requires centers. The center of a city needs to be the true commons of the city in which the full diversity of people, work and culture will be represented.
Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
Also on this blog: The Future of Cities - Back to Basics?
Related materials:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/...ing-and-what-can-really-revitalize-downtowns/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/01/upshot/american-cities-office-conversion.html
https://www.lincolninst.edu/publica...fice-residential-conversions-are-on-the-rise/
https://www.bizjournals.com/baltimo...1-n-charles-office-downtown-auction-sale.html
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/new...ons-across-the-us-arlington-cleveland/708197/