ENDING THE OFFICE BULDING ERA

THE AGE OF THE OFFICE BUILDING ENDS…

Before the great Covid pandemic of 2020 who could have predicted that the Age of The Office Building would meet its inevitable demise. Add to the equation a world in the midst of a global climate crisis and the fate of the great twentieth century office building looks grim. These two factors are the epitaph of modern business life as we know it. The pandemic caused a decentralization of labor and climate change has made wasteful office buildings the dinosaurs of their time. 

Office buildings and the modern cities from which they were born have become so interdependent that nearly every urban area in the world is challenged to adapt to their slow death. Businesses will save billions by closing their offices to operate virtually but cities stand to lose those same billions. Some local and federal employers are eager to repopulate empty offices hoping it may stimulate economic recovery. In the short-term that strategy may work but it is all too clear that cities must explore alternatives to rebuilding revenue in the final days of the office building boom. 

In the end repurposing or demolishing obsolete office buildings could mean that cities could become greener, employees could earn higher wages and stockholders might realize larger profits from companies that no longer pay rent to house hundreds of thousands of people for only a few hours a day. All of these factors are rapidly redefining twenty-first century business. Will the death of the office building trigger an exodus from urban areas? Will it inspire a revivification of urban life replacing cubicles with small-scale industry, manufacturing and affordable housing? Can it provide an unexpected opportunity to restore the diversity once seen in nineteenth and early twentieth century cities? Will the abandoned carcasses of imposing office buildings be removed allowing the sun into lots that have been covered with crowded buildings for the past century? Can we harvest these monstrous mountains of modernity and safeguard the true architectural gems of our cities. Are our city leaders in front of this change or are they desperately holding on to the last breaths of a lost cause… the office building?

Office buildings are products of the industrial revolution. Prior to them cities were a dense and diversely layered but modestly scaled reticulation of residential, manufacturing/industrial and retail uses. The office building gradually pushed residential manufacturing/industrial and commercial diversity out of most cities. Some cities like New York managed to maintain much of the pedestrian street level diversity but others such as Washington, DC have transformed their downtown areas into monolithic office blocks infamous for losing their human vibrancy when the office day ends. 

The footprints of every great office marvel of the late 19th, 20th and early 21st century office building was once a richly diverse neighborhood of smaller scaled residential and commercial edifices. Modern cities have all struggled to maintain that vibrancy beyond the end of the business day.

Archeology has uncovered many ancient cities that were thought to have been abandoned due to famine and disease but modern medicine had appeared to have solved that problem. If teleworking and energy/climate concerns trigger the emptying of cities it would not be the first time that cities were abandoned due to cataclysmic economic and environmental changes. In the face of climate and environmental decay cities may ultimately define the last footprint of humanity on our planet. But for those millions who no longer need to live close to the office an inevitable exodous from urban areas may ensue.

One thing is certain, every city whose r'aison d'etre depends on hundreds of thoussnds of weekday office workers and commuters may have to reinvent itself inorder to survive the next quarter of the twenty-first century. 

By Bigdaddy Blues