Can architecture save the American downtown? Or at least give it a much-needed shot in the arm?
Hollowed out by hybrid work schedules and caricatured as lawless by the likes of Fox News, many of America’s urban cores are less vibrant than at any point since the 1970s. Nationally, according to a recent Conference Board survey, office occupancy rates post-pandemic have settled around 50 percent, leaving one cubicle empty for each one that is filled.
Converting commercial towers into apartments or condominiums is one popular strategy for bringing people back. At 25 Water Street in Manhattan’s financial district, the New York architecture firm CetraRuddy has overseen the transformation of a 22-story office building into a residential tower with 1,300 rental apartments, the city’s largest such makeover yet.
But many office buildings simply aren’t good candidates for conversion. The bigger the tower — and the bigger its floor plates — the tougher it becomes to turn work spaces into apartments without stranding residents far from natural light and operable windows.
That leaves cities looking for other strategies for coaxing their downtowns back to full, prepandemic vitality — and canny architects repackaging their pitches to clients to emphasize their talents as resourceful regenerators of urban life. Two examples on the West Coast, where the malaise has been especially slow to lift, suggest the promise and the limits of looking to high-profile architecture, beyond the office-to-residential conversion, as catalyst.
After an elevated freeway in Seattle called the Alaskan Way Viaduct was taken down in phases beginning in 2011, city leaders considered no shortage of proposals imagining new parks, bike paths and gardens in its place. The goal was to restitch long-severed connections between the city’s downtown and its waterfront. But progress came in fits and starts, and, once the coronavirus pandemic began, fell into a deep freeze.