The skeleton in the background of the photo above, located in downtown Clearwater, Florida near where I vacationed last March, is an unusual (if incomplete) example of adaptive reuse. In 2004, a developer purchased the mostly vacant 15-story office tower for a mere $5.7 million, with a plan to convert it to a $45 million mixed-use luxury condominium project called The Strand. The developer gutted the office building, but by mid-2009, construction all but ground to a halt, as the project's financial backers decided to try to wait out the bust.

Given the city of Seattle's goal of bringing more housing to downtown, could office-to-residential adaptive reuse ever become a viable approach? To the best of my knowledge, there is only one example of a large-scale conversion from office to residential in Seattle: The Cobb, at 4th and University (disclosure: my employer, GGLO, was the project architect).



The 11-story, 91-unit Cobb building was recognized in AIA Seattle's Future Shack competition last year, the judges commenting that "Preserving and reusing existing buildings is, by nature, the most sustainable thing we can do, and The Cobb is an outstanding example of respectful preservation and inventive reuse." Adaptive reuse: Everybody's doing it.

In Seattle, both the economics and market are totally different, and it will likely be rare for all the factors required to make conversion from large-scale office to housing attractive to align. It worked at The Cobb mainly because the building is historic---it had become obsolete for modern offices and it qualified for historic tax-credit financing. In most cases, simply getting office floorplates to lay out well for residential units would be a serious encumbrance.

Eventually, efforts to mitigate climate change could help favor adaptive reuse over demolition.  A carbon pricing system that put a value on the embodied carbon in existing buildings would make saving existing structures---particularly concrete---a more financially attractive option.

In the long view, the smart strategy would be to design buildings built with all the possibilities of reuse in mind.  Unfortunately, taking the long view is not one our culture's strengths.