Conversion of large office buildings to residential will require revamped regulations

Transforming older commercial buildings for residential use can be a fairly straightforward endeavor.

Office buildings built after 1960, however, present more challenges, and if a trend to convert these spaces to condos and apartments gathers steam, a rethinking of regulations will be required, say John Cetra, cofounder at New York-based architecture firm CetraRuddy, in a GlobeSt report. Developers and architects will have to be particularly creative in redesigning larger buildings for residential use.

Because the plates are much deeper in large post-1960s office building, there are long spaces where an apartment would be 50 feet in depth from the window. So, the distance between the windows and walls might have to be changed to make up for the ventilation that would have come through a window.

HVAC zoning would likely have to be readjusted, particularly in a post-COVID world with more concern over maintaining healthy indoor air quality. Interior spaces would have to be re-zoned to maintain a higher level of fresh air.

The large floor layouts mean that small studio apartments would have to be very narrow and deep. This will reduce the potential for daylighting.

New York City has two very large buildings dedicated to answering the 911 calls of its five boroughs. With more than 11 million emergency calls annually, it makes perfect sense. The second of these buildings, the Public Safety Answering Center II (PSAC II) is located on a nine-acre parcel of land in the Bronx. It’s an imposing 450,000 square-foot structure—a 240-foot-wide by 240-foot-tall cube. The gleaming aluminum cube risesthe equivalent of 24 stories from behind a grassy berm, projecting the unlikely impression that it might actually be floating. Like most visually striking structures, the building has drawn as much scorn as it has admiration.