Office Towers to Home Offices: The Full Circle

"Is housing the future of obsolete office towers?" is a rhetorical question taken from the website of PCA-STREAM , a "Paris-based architecture, urban strategies, and research office", according to their own self-description. PCA-STREAM is responsible for designing the renovation and conversion of one of the most emblematic office buildings of Nantes, the Tour Bretagne. The building was shut down in 2020, when the last tenants vacated the offices due to the pandemic, and has been closed since, mostly because of lack of interest.

Office buildings, and particularly older ones, are suffering throughout the world and many districts are seeing increasing vacancy rates. The main reason is the proliferation of #flexiblework, which has reduced the need for in-office work, and consequently the demand for office space. In a recent post, Francis Saele sees on one hand that "Demand for legacy office space remains in limbo or falling" and on the other hand that there is "an exception for some office properties proposing adaptive reuse". As he puts it: "When redeveloped, these conversions to apartments (primarily) will have a reliable income stream to finance."

The renovated "Tour Bretagne" will combine a 4* hotel with 107 rooms, shops at the base, a restaurant on the roof, at the heart of a vast garden terrace, above a tower of approximately 200 residential units. At the very top there will be a rooftop panorama bar.

Chris Fraley , now the chief investment officer for Forge Development Partners , ran a similar residential conversion program in New York back in the 90s, and is already in the construction-design phase of a project to convert the historic Humboldt Bank Building in San Francisco from an underutilized office property into 124 apartments for middle-income residents.

Converting office buildings, and particularly older office buildings, to housing is not an easy task. Removing obsolete material and replacing decaying infrastructure is part of the problem, which is only made worse by conflicting regulations and zoning restrictions. That is why high rise towers, like the Tour Bretagne and other towers, are the most promising candidates; only one permit is needed and one city council for the entire project. The cost for converting a smaller building may be prohibitive, and taking it down to build a high rise residential tower may be a better and even a more sustainable option.

This resonates with the opinion of Lewis Dijkstra , lead city and territory analyst at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission , who introduced the concept of Functional Urban Areas back in 2012, in a joint program with the OECD - OCDE . Dijkstra believes that the higher the population density in a city, the higher the demand and pressure for services and utilities becomes, creating a more livable and sustainable environment. In that respect, he believes that high rise residential buildings can have the effect of regulating the housing prices in areas and cities with high demand and may allow for larger apartments with more space per inhabitant, compared to lower rise buildings. And, perhaps counterintuitively, he is suggesting that urban centers with high demand should reconsider giving permits for constructing higher rise buildings, and why not, residential skyscrapers.

Now, if the future of obsolete or newly constructed towers is housing, we may be replacing one problem with another. By providing more space and accepting that the lower demand for offices is not temporary but permanent, we are implicitly accepting that the future of work is flexible. We are indirectly acknowledging that we are already in a new era of normalized working from home (WFH), where almost half of the work time will be spent at home. This is also demonstrated in the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (SWAA) and advocated by Nick Bloom , Professor at 美国斯坦福大学 and leading voice in all matters related to WFH.

But spending too much time at home, and more importantly, spending too much time working alone, can have implications at a personal and at a societal level in the long term. Sure, flexible work arrangements can be accommodating and can provide a better work-life-balance, and there are numerous studies suggesting that employees in companies with flexible schedules are happier and more productive than employees in fully on-site or fully remote settings.

Diana Lind , Writer and Urban Policy Specialist, in a recent article for Slate coins the term "human doom loop" referring to the cycle of virtual life that is making us lonely and unhappy. In a similar tone, Dr. Delia McCabe , Neuroscientist and Cognitive Health Expert, in a recent post, claims that "we are physiologically and neurologically poorly equipped to thrive in this artificial and complex world we’ve created for ourselves".

Before the pandemic (yes, there once was such a time), the office was one of the principal places for socialization and relationship-building. Ironically, the conversion of office buildings into housing, may find some tenants working from home in the same physical space they used to work in an office. Yet, they will find themselves without their colleagues and with fewer opportunities for workplace friendships. A recent KPMG survey confirmed that workplace friendships play a critical role in employee mental health and job satisfaction. The same survey showed that "58% of professionals say technologies are driving an over-reliance on digital channels and replacing the need for personal, face-to-face interactions that help form stronger close work friendships". Importantly, 84% of professionals believe it’s important that companies facilitate personal interactions to help develop work friendships (see chart below).

By enabling more time spent in our homes, we are increasing the amount of time we spend alone. And this results in less time spent with others, which means less meaningful physical human connection. Eva Machón Saavedra, in a recent article for El Pais, noticed that welcoming neighbors and friends without prior warning has become nearly non-existent in the social fabric of big cities and wonders why unexpected visitors are in danger of extinction. The answer she gives to her rhetorical question is "individualism, mobile phones and social fatigue". But perhaps it is something deeper, perhaps it is fear and lack of trust to the physical presence of other individuals, something we forcefully lost almost completely during the pandemic.

So how can the organizations foster workplaces that facilitate interactions, if employees spend more-and-more the largest part of their time at home? Unsurprisingly and perhaps counterintuitively, I believe that the answer is hiding in plain sight. If on one hand we spend more time working from home, we have more space at home, less office space, and on the other hand, we need to foster and develop close work friendships, then coworking from home appears as a no-brainer. And this is how Coremoting was designed, at first as a simple concept of sharing space and spending workdays together, and then it gradually developed as a tool to connect, a tool to explore and dive into the hidden benefits of building personal and social relationships in a professional setting.

Organizations facilitating and endorsing Coremoting can help employees build connections and friendships in a structured, trustful and privacy respecting way, without relying only on random extracurricular activities like "holiday parties, happy hours or rooftop socials" that tend to be dominated by confident and assertive extroverts.

If our future is mostly "at home", then we need to embrace this future and make our homes hospitable again. The conversion of offices to houses is a great opportunity to reimagine our homes as social places for personal and work-related interactions. This will be the way to recreate lost and create new meaningful connections, strong friendships and human relations, break the "human doom loop", increase our workplace engagement and, in the end, our personal #happiness.