All plans for Charlotte’s future promote uptown, our main employment hub where 50,000 workers toil in towers. Charlotte’s self-image is tied to these mighty, man-made stalagmites of corporate power that symbolize the city’s place in national finance.
But a national seismic shift is occurring in the meaning and content of office work, one that will change radically the lives of the workers and the form of the buildings. It’s not just about the office interior, or even the design of the building itself. This upheaval goes deeper: it will change American cities. Skyscrapers, our urban hallmark for over a century, are especially vulnerable to this revolution in the design and management of corporate real estate.
Could the unthinkable happen? Could Charlotte’s towers go dark as the unforgiving pressures of business make them obsolete? Could the city survive this trauma? Are these forces of change so powerful that they could undo all the good work of the last decade to bring uptown back to life?
The answer is yes, unless we anticipate this change rather than merely respond to it. By then it will be too late. The leasing agents of the Hearst Tower, and other high-rise properties uptown may not know it, but they’re dealing in dinosaurs.
The changes in office work in the next few decades will transform the city landscape as surely as the changes of the Industrial Revolution did 200 years ago. It’s a complex story involving information technology, global competition, increasing energy costs, higher expectations by workers of their building environments, and fundamental changes to the concept of real estate, where time becomes more important than space.
This makes it an issue of the bottom line. And that’s why this change is inevitable.
But that doesn’t mean it’s bad. We just have to figure out what’s happening and why. Then we can act, be part of that change, and create a new city, a new uptown.
“All That Is Solid Melts Into Air”
Marx’s poetic metaphor about social change in the 19th century industrial world still fits transformations in our post-industrial age, especially those having to do with firm phenomena like buildings and cities.
Years before September 11 altered forever the way we think of skyscrapers, an unprecedented convergence of global economics and information technology forced companies to rethink working methods and organizations in radical ways. Mundane tasks were outsourced to back offices in rural America, or in developing countries, all linked by the Internet. Information technology makes it possible to use time and space in new ways. In more and more ways, the workplace follows the sun.
For example, at the close of their working day, Charlotte architects email sketches to branch offices in India or China and have them back on their PCs the next morning, developed and rendered. By using time in this way, the offices use less space and save money. Good news for the firms, but bad news for the larger world of corporate real estate.
One man who knows more about this subject than most is Frank Duffy, an English architect, a past president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), and a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) an honor awarded by the Queen for his services to architecture. More specifically, he’s an expert on office design with more than 20 years’ experience worldwide.
In a recent book, The New Office, Duffy relates an epiphany which came to him some years ago, gazing over Dallas’ skyscraper skyline. He’d been advising the senior partners of a large international corporation how they could use their office space more effectively; in their passionate pursuit of profits the partners wanted to reduce their occupancy costs, cutting rent, property taxes, service charges and energy bills. Duffy explained how the company could shrink its office space almost by half by using technology more effectively, and by reducing and reshaping its work areas to fit the new work patterns. In short, they could vacate a lot of space in the downtown towers of Dallas and other cities, saving big bucks in the process. The partners were ecstatic.
But Duffy’s mind was troubled. Many of the glittering towers he was looking at were less than 10 years old — and his expert advice was already making them obsolete. Not only that, these towering buildings, from which Dallas derived its identity, and from which Duffy had just eliminated a major tenant (and presumably, many more companies that would follow this cost-cutting example) were parts of his clients’ pension fund portfolios. Suddenly, real estate didn’t seem so real anymore.
Mr. Taylor Takes Charge
Today, more than 50 percent of North American employees work in offices, up from a mere five percent in 1900. But for most of the 20th century, office work was seen as dull; Kafka depicted the office as a nightmare. As the 20th century progressed, more and more people were required to process more and more information, usually in paper format, and often by means of tedious, repetitive clerical tasks.
The dominant model of corporate order came from the work of Frederick Taylor (1856-1915) whose great contribution was “scientific management,” or, treating people as if they were simply units of production, extensions of machines. Taylorism, as it became known, dehumanized work, first in the factory, then in the office. From a company’s point of view, employees were managed best if they were treated as automatons, required to come and go at fixed hours and to follow set procedures. Innovative thinking was the last thing expected from rank and file office workers. Dilbert, anyone?
Taylorism was the dominant management philosophy when the large urban office building was developed in America over a century ago. Taylor’s values — order, hierarchy, supervision, depersonalization — became integral principles for American office design. When combined with technological innovations — the steel frame, the elevator, electric light, the telephone — and with new patterns of downtown real estate — very tall buildings on small sites — this once radical mixture became so successful that the model of clustered skyscrapers has proved remarkably resistant to change. It’s still the basic premise of much Charlotte real estate planning.
Even when new management theories evolved in the 1960s, and technological innovation blossomed in the 1990s, these changes made little impact on the way designers and real estate professionals thought about office environments. Until now.
Alternative Traditions
Part of this change derives from continental European office design shaped by very different values. European cities are older, and achieved their identities before the modern office building was invented; hence such buildings have not been granted the same prestigious place in the urban environment.
In the social democratic climate of northern Europe, “Workers’ Councils” in Germany, Holland and Scandinavia have the right to negotiate the working environment with employers. No one in a Dutch office sits further than 16 feet from an openable window. To do otherwise would be illegal. Most European workers have direct external views, and control over their own heating and lighting. Many workers have their own cellular offices, regardless of rank. This leads to longer, shallower, and more energy-efficient buildings.
Contrast that with the common American practice of windowless offices buried deep inside buildings where no natural light or air ever penetrates.
European countries take energy more seriously. Here we waste energy at work the same way we squander it in our SUVs. We take cheap energy for granted; our energy-hungry buildings save the developer money and push the costs onto society — in the form of pollution, noise and waste.
Wherever they’re located, conventional offices can work only if everyone is at his or her place at the same time. The standard nine-to-five working day, the clear separation between home and work, the bedroom suburb, the uptown core, and the vast apparatus of commuting which characterizes Charlotte, all derive from this simple premise of simultaneity. Architects call these offices “hives.”
By contrast, tomorrow’s workspace will be more like “clubs,” where people with common interests share a rich and diverse environment with different kinds of space for different kinds of tasks undertaken at different times. This transformation, along with two other types of office space described below, sets the scene for future developments.
New Ways of Working
It’s no surprise to learn the hive is losing its status as the predominant type of office environment. For years, tasks traditionally carried out by clerks have been taken over by computers, a continuing trend that will shrink such offices to a small minority of workplaces. In a hive, work is broken down into small tasks carried out in fixed routines. The workspace is typically characterized by a simple repetitive layout of individual desks with no screens or low screens for easy supervision of workers. There are still plenty of hives in Charlotte today. But their days are numbered.
Apart from hives and clubs, the two other types of offices are “dens” and “cells.” Both will increase as office work becomes more diverse. Dens are common today in design firms or companies in media and advertising. Most work is group work, often coming in intense spurts of activity, and the layout reflects this, with suites of spaces for groups to produce their work and have meetings and consult resources.
Cells, as the name implies, are individual spaces for private study or confidential work. The traditional lawyer’s office, or the professor’s study, are the most obvious examples — now served by state-of-art IT.
Cells have long been seen as perks for higher management, and as such occupy a small proportion of office space in America. With the changes in office culture that put more emphasis on intellectual work, cells will become more frequent, but not so numerous as clubs, the real growth zone in American office environments.
In the future, a greater proportion of office work will require more initiative and creative thinking. In the club-type environment, high-level work is carried out by talented people working collaboratively and independently. The space needs are complex, similar to (despite their sexist overtones) the gentlemen’s clubs of a bygone era.
These clubs offered places for group conversations, private rooms for confidential dealings, and other spaces for recreation, eating and drinking. People came and went on their own irregular schedules and chose their own mode of interaction with others, using the resources of the establishment as their needs required. If you add the latest in mobile phones and laptop technologies, you have the most potent office of the future.
Now, all this might be very interesting, but how do these changes affect the design of office buildings? Can’t we just push the partitions into a different layout? Paint the walls jazzy colors? And how does this affect uptown Charlotte?
Office locations are affected by trends toward smaller core operations, more networking, and more people working on the move. These tendencies reduce the need for large buildings and place more emphasis on the recycling of existing ones, turning warehouses into offices (SouthEnd) or housing into offices (The Addison on Morehead).
Duffy goes so far as to call the real estate industry’s emphasis on large, single-use office buildings “a mistake.” The vast majority of office organizations are small and getting smaller, through continual outsourcing and the development of a more mobile workforce where more people work away from the office for longer periods.
Thinking about the office as a special, separate building type might soon be out of date. The practice of spending vast amounts of money on buildings used for only a fraction of the working week is almost certainly doomed. Once viewed as assets on a balance sheet, corporate real estate in the global economy is now a cost — something that must be minimized to enhance profitability. In this context, property is more often the rock on which a business can founder than the foundation for future growth.
Corporate real estate will have to respond to this world of dissolving bureaucracies. Many experts think it will be more economical to use the less attractive, lower cost sites, and sell the “jewels” — usually the downtown towers — of the portfolio. Skyscrapers are inherently less flexible with large amounts of space being taken up on all floors by rows of expensive elevators, clusters of escape stairs and mechanical ductwork, none of which can be easily modified.
In a prediction that should resonate loudly in Charlotte, Duffy forecasts, “the office tower may soon be as redundant as the steam-powered mill.” There will be few successors to the Bank of America building. Instead, as Duffy and other commentators point out, creative office work can be devolved to any location — a converted warehouse, a country cottage, anywhere it makes practical and financial sense.
This might suggest that uptown will become obsolete because people will prefer the “cool virtuality of the electronic cottage” to face-to-face encounters. But this is a false dichotomy.
Most of us will work from a number of different places — home, the car, the hotel, the airport — but even as this future grows upon us, there’s plenty of evidence that some city centers, far from decaying, are regenerating themselves. Skilled office workers relish the half-accidental, half-planned encounters that only a city can provide, and which are an increasingly essential part of our business lives. Cities suit networkers. But cities are changing, and we’re using them in more interesting and entertaining ways.
New Buildings; New Cities
Although the global trend is for companies to use less space and arrange it in different locations, the need for buildings still exists. But in contrast to the fixed design of skyscrapers, the new imperative is “reversibility,” the ability to “future proof” the buildings by a combination of innovation and flexibility.
Concerns about energy costs, and higher expectations by valuable, high-skilled workers regarding their workplaces, are breeding innovations in environmental design — the way spaces are heated, cooled and serviced — and in the design of the building’s external facade.
Just as office work is changing, so, at last, are our attitudes about energy use and pollution. As our water and air become more polluted, we are becoming more environmentally conscious, making such narrow-minded and mechanistic assumptions about design no longer valid. Now, the most innovative architects and engineers are working with, not against nature.
As a result, buildings are becoming much more interesting, driving down energy costs for the owners while giving employees more opportunity to control their working environment. Building facades include louvers, sunscreens and shades; spaces are connected on many levels, rising up through buildings as convection “towers,” creating lively rooflines and using high school physics to draw cool air through the building naturally. Small motors pump cold water through concrete ceilings, creating cool surfaces that chill air naturally as it rises; these more comfortable working conditions save space and money compared to conventional air-conditioning.
The list goes on, but just as important as innovation in design are the changes in city planning that flow from the office revolution.
Uptown’s Future
For Charlotte, the office revolution poses serious challenges. Uptown has improved dramatically in the last 10 years, driven primarily by office development and followed by housing. Serious retail, however, remains a difficult problem, Fourth Ward’s Harris Teeter notwithstanding. Still, more improvements are likely as rail transit spurs development of the desolate, wasted acres around the glittering towers.
But our success obscures potential problems. While banks have powered our mini-renaissance, that business sector is behind the curve of sweeping changes in office design and management.
In Duffy’s worldwide survey of innovative offices, not a single example comes from the financial sector. Commercial achievement in the past often impedes innovation in the future, and change seems less crucial for companies that feel secure. However, these days, such security is an illusion. As the investment mantra goes, “Past performance is no guarantee of future success.”
The best buildings are those that have many lives. They can adapt and change, where previous uses are like palimpsests, enriching the future with the past. But Charlotte’s tradition has been to tear down buildings the moment they become obsolete, or appear so.
That’s why we’re not seeing many new trends in Charlotte. There’s a meager stock of older, robust buildings to convert to lively new uses. SouthEnd, with its recycled warehouses for creative small businesses, and new live/work units where you can commute downstairs whenever you want, is one of the few places where Charlotte is in touch with the times.
Charlotte is a monument to outdated synchronicity. Not just in the design of office buildings that still work on the premise of everybody coming to work at the same time, but in the millions of dollars spent widening interstates to carry peak hour commuters.
While our developing rail transit system also focuses on uptown, this travel mode is designed to support alternative patterns of development, in the form of urban villages around the train stations along the line. In the absence of old warehouse districts, these urban villages will be the location of many smaller, state-of-the-art offices, integrated into communities along with housing, shops, schools, churches and other civic uses. These high intensity, mixed-use neighborhoods will become destinations in their own right, offering the convenient urban lifestyles required by many office workers, without the car-dependent isolation of the suburbs.
As 21st century offices in Charlotte evolve into different forms, the real estate industry will need to develop new ways of thinking about property management and financing. Technical innovations in management and design will make current conservative practices — like the isolation of office buildings into a separate category for easy funding — retrogressive and ultimately futile. The resistance to funding innovative mixed-use buildings will dissipate; not because architects wish it, but because the technologically driven marketplace will demand it. More radical concepts in space leasing, such as paying on the basis of services rented per hour, rather than square footage per year, are becoming increasingly common.
Innovative uptown development is stymied by the exorbitant cost of land, which forces developers to go high to build enough space to make a profit. But the concerns of working in skyscrapers after September 11, combined with the radical changes transforming office work and office space, will, like Duffy’s Dallas epiphany, force a market re-evaluation of property prices and management.
For architects, the challenge is urgent. The inventive regeneration of existing buildings, both new and old, to provide new types of offices and a range of complementary uses is a greater test of talent than devising a fancy facade for a 50-story anachronism whose day is done.
We should build no more single function towers, and instead construct lower, mixed-use buildings. Our skyscrapers will stand, but defunct office space within them will be converted to other uses, primarily housing or hotels, in future decades. The insulated skywalks and Overstreet Mall — which only thrived because office work and workers were isolated from the rest of city life — will be ripped out and the lower floors of the towers opened to the street, for recreation, shopping and living.
In a community that takes pride in conservative views and values, Charlotte’s city center is balanced on a knife edge. Creative people crave human contact, and if uptown can adapt, it will survive, even thrive. But banking and real estate view change with suspicion, and finance the future with what’s worked in the past. However, when globalization and information technology are rewriting the rulebook faster than we think, this strategy won’t suffice.
Do we have the entrepreneurial spirit to explore new options, and embrace change in time to profit from it? Do we have the clients to commission new, smarter buildings? Do we have the bankers to fund them? Do we have the architects to design them and the property managers to run them?
There’s a simple test. If we still think the Hearst Tower is a cool new building, then the answer is no. *
This article appears in Jun 19-25, 2002.
