ADAPT AND LEARN

In a world suffering from climate change, breathing life into old structures is one of the most regenerative things we can do for our planet. It has been suggested by the World Green Building Council that 11% of global carbon emissions are a direct result of construction. What if we could reduce that to 10% or 9%, simply by taking advantage of our existing building stock?

There is something unique and elegantly beautiful about adapting an old space to a new typology. The recent mall conversion to workplace by Truliant Federal Credit Union is a prime example of how successful this can be for our environment and our bank accounts. Little worked with the leaders of Truliant to prepare an economic comparison of purchasing and converting an old Macy’s versus constructing a new building on the existing campus. It was determined that the purchase and adaptation of Macys store to their Operations Center would save Truliant over $10 million dollars. Always focused on their members, Truliant purchased the Macy's store and recently completed their conversion to support their growth needs with great success. Truliant went even further, adding solar panels and beehives to the roof, improving our world, one step at a time.

Another exciting example can be found in downtown Rock Hill, SC. The partnership between The Kieth Corporation and Capital Broadcasting Company has committed to saving an old warehouse and re-energizing this section of town. The conversion is a true mixed use dream including retail, office, and multi-family. Several courtyards are being carved out of the heart of the building creating a powerful sense of place. To capture the carbon impact, Little used the Cove Tool app to compare new construction to this adaptive re-use. The impact was the reduction of over 20,000 metric tons of Embodied and Operational Emissions over a 50-year period.

But there is something else hidden within the walls of adaptive re-use, learning. What can we learn from the world today as office buildings struggle to convert to residential? Who knows what the future of transportation holds in store for us. It makes you ponder the impact of parking deck demolition alone in our futures future.

The scale at which office space is becoming vacant has staggered the industry. Some even say that the conversion of office buildings to residential is the key to the housing crisis and that this is a real opportunity to improve our cities and our planet.

What makes the environments we live in engaging is flexibility and that is at the heart of mixed-use communities. There is a reason that we strive to find the live/work/play environment, it is dynamically intertwined, more residential drives more retail and in turn, they both fuel more office, which then impacts residential. It is a fragile dance that is constantly adjusting and adapting. To be clear, office is not dead, it is evolving, and it will remain in our systemic typology of life.

There are hard lessons being learned today by those who convert office buildings to residential. The office building plates are too deep, and the glass typologies don’t align, and the mechanical systems are ineffective to note a few. For decades the golden rectangle for efficient office floor plates, 120’x240’ clothed in floor to ceiling glass veil has dominated the industry, to a fault. Even more egregious have been ridiculous parking ratios. Our drive for parking convenience has resulted in trillions of unnecessary and unused parking stalls. What can the pain of today’s conversions teach us about the way we should design? How do we wake up long enough to understand the interconnected living nature of our cities and design with a sense of flexibility at the forefront, right alongside scale and proportionality. Imagine if we learned and our children’s children experience a world where those construction carbon emissions have been reduced to 5%? Imagine a world where adapting structures are commonplace.