“Some were designed like doughnuts, some like an L shape or a skinny bar about 60 feet wide. The shape of the floor plate in those older buildings also makes them ideal for converting to residential, says Charles. That makes them well-suited for residential conversion, she says. Office buildings built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries didn’t have air conditioning-or even electricity in some cases-“so they were designed with operable windows to take advantage of natural light and ventilation,” she explains. Key considerations for determining the suitability of office buildings for successful residential conversions are access to light and ventilation, says Charles, which is largely determined by the size and shape of a building’s floor plate (a floor plate refers to the entire floor of a building). And some are not.” Residential essentials: Light, ventilation, and the right floor plate “In a nutshell, some office buildings are great for that. “There’s currently a lot of talk about converting office buildings to residential as a solution to our housing crisis,” says Charles. Projects she worked on included creating condominiums and student housing. She worked on designing the adaptive reuse of several older office buildings in Chicago in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when she practiced architecture as vice president of Booth Hanson in Chicago. In part one, faculty in the Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration who are real estate experts looked at how the phenomenon impacts investors and developers: What Do Empty Office Buildings Mean for the Economy? All faculty interviewed for these stories teach in the Cornell Baker Program in Real Estate.Ĭharles, former acting chair of the Paul Rubacha Department of Real Estate, a multicollege department jointly managed between AAP and the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, shares insights based on her firsthand experience. Here, in part two of our story about low office building occupancy, architect Suzanne Lanyi Charles, associate professor of city and regional planning and of real estate in the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP), addresses the feasibility of converting office space to residential housing. Is the solution really that simple? Professor Suzanne Lanyi Charles (photo by William Staffeld/Cornell AAP) These two realities have generated a widely popular idea: converting office space to residential units. At the same time, the United States is experiencing a chronic housing shortage. San Francisco, for example, recently hit an office vacancy rate of nearly 32 percent. More than 20 percent of office space is vacant nationwide, according to global real estate services company Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL), with some cities spiking higher yet.
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