Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
Following last week’s visit to New York-based Architecture Research Office, we are moving our Meet Your Next Employer series to Richmond, VA this week to explore the work of 3North. From their studios in both Richmond and San Francisco, the firm has built a portfolio across twenty years along a... View full entry
MVRDV has completed work on a vibrant new conversion project in Berlin called HAUS 1 that reworked an aging office building from 1997 into a new hub for innovation and community. Other than the eye-catching canary color finish, the project is visually dominated by an extended grand external... View full entry
Gensler Principal Steven Paynter shares an update announcing important statistical findings related to his firm’s work surrounding the adaptive reuse and conversion of office buildings worldwide. The data report has been updated to reflect changes in office conversions. The firm shares that an... View full entry
Montreal’s Maisonneuve Library has reopened to the public following a major restoration and expansion of the historic building. Dating from 1912, and once serving as a city hall, the building’s transformation was led by Montreal-based EVOQ Architecture and Dan Hanganu Architects, now part of... View full entry
The Biden Administration has announced a new initiative aimed at financing office conversions in an effort to combat the growing problem of high vacancy rates and housing affordability in markets large and small across the country. The announcement comes as vacancy rates have skyrocketed to... View full entry
MAD Architects has unveiled its design for the renovation and adaptive reuse of an old cement factory in Shanghai. The ‘Wanmicang’ warehouse sits on the south side of the Shanghai Zhangjiang Cement Factory grounds and has been reimagined by MAD as a “three-dimensional hierarchy of time and... View full entry
The building’s future as housing began to take shape this week when the Brodsky Organization, a residential developer, bought a stake in the 22-story, triangular-shaped tower on Fifth Avenue. Brodsky will lead the conversion, carving out units — either for sale as condominiums or as rentals — from the notoriously awkward space.
The exact layout and the number of new residences have not been determined.
— The New York Times
The project will take about three years to complete once plans finally clear the lengthy approval process. Developers told the New York Times they are considering multiple schemes but have yet to determine the total number of residential units the conversion will create. The saga began with... View full entry
Brooks + Scarpa has proposed an adaptive reuse renovation of the Marcel Breuer-designed Robert C. Weaver Federal Building in Washington, D.C. in an effort to address the chronic issue of empty office space plaguing the city’s economic growth and downtown core. The proposal is included in a new... View full entry
Montreal-based Atelier L’Abri has completed a Passive House retrofit in the southern Quebec village of Frelighsburg, Canada. Named Maison Melba, the project saw a former 1970s car garage transformed into a living space that is also open to the community for collaborative projects. Image... View full entry
The transformation of an aging brutalist monument to communism into a new tech education center geared toward teenagers in the capital city of Albania has been officially inaugurated following a three-and-a-half-year revitalization effort led by MVRDV. The project remade the 127,000-square-foot... View full entry
Amid the backdrop of a national trend of tumbling enrollments, brutal pandemic-era learning losses and an ongoing flight of young families from urban centers, the dilemma of how to repurpose empty schools is that many cities face. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 2,200 public schools closed from 2019 to 2022. Chicago’s experiences offer some insights into what can happen to these spaces, and the communities around them, after the students get sent home. — Bloomberg
Lamar Johnson Collaborative Associate Principal Max Komnenich tells Bloomberg the other side to the growing problem of school closings can offer a “beacon for reinvestment” given the proper incentives. His firm’s Aspire Center conversion took advantage of a $12.5 million TIF that’s... View full entry
A four-finalist shortlist for Transform 1012 N. Main Street’s adaptive reuse and racial equity project has been announced as part of a multiphase selection process that will eventually deliver the new Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing to Fort Worth, Texas. The chance at... View full entry
Several leading design and construction firms in the UK have signed onto a new appeal urging Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to halt his program of delayed implementations of key environmental building regulations in the interest of protecting a net-zero carbon emissions future in the... View full entry
Construction has been completed on the MVRDV-designed Shenzhen Women & Children’s Centre, transforming an old mixed-use tower in the Chinese megacity into a “vibrant and colorful skyscraper.” The 330-foot-tall tower contains a hotel alongside a range of facilities for the welfare of women... View full entry
U.S. colleges are taking advantage of a post-pandemic increase in affordable, unused offices by purchasing such properties for educational use, according to reporting by The New York Times. Since 2018, numerous higher education institutions in the U.S. have been acquiring office buildings, with... View full entry