![]() The thing you'll notice about these letter shapes is that they include holes. Historically, many larger office and residential buildings were shaped like letters of the alphabet, when viewed from above: A, B, E, U, P, and R. These are near the waterfront and used to be in the noisy shadow of the Alaskan Way Viaduct before that came down. ![]() Nd place went to some historic warehouses that have been office buildings for a while. So these buildings really do have a have a very cyclical lifecycle."Īnd so, Humble added, its redesign should allow “for disassembly and adaptability, so that in the future, it can be reconfigured into some other use, if needed.” They did substantial remodeling, back into office again in the 1980s. They converted it to housing in the 1960s. They added five floors to it, back in 1916. "But this building was built in 1895 as two-story building. "We kind of think of these buildings as static in time," Humble said. This was important to Humble, because who knows where the real estate market will go? That’s because the owner will not have scattered new bathrooms and plumbing across the floor in every apartment - bathrooms are consolidated in a few locations on each floor, not unlike bathrooms in an office. In this case, common spaces are put there, in large rooms with a window at the far end.Īnother advantage of this strategy is that it’s easy to convert back to offices later, if the market shifts. The strategy also helps address one of the core challenges with converting old office buildings to apartments: It gives you a way to use the dark interior space in the center of the floor, which is too far away from the window wall for most living spaces. In the renovated Mutual Life Building, residents would live in single rooms and share amenities like bathrooms and kitchens. They leaned on a historic archetype, long phased out by many cities, known as “single-room occupancy hotels.” The design team proposed turning the building’s office floors into affordable housing for people transitioning out of homelessness. And they were very receptive to the idea of converting this to housing." "They're not getting any income, so to speak, from this building right now. "We walked through the building with the leasing people, and it's substantially vacant," said Rob Humble of Hybrid Architecture, part of the project team. Were Yesler alive today, he'd probably find life within his building a bit of a disappointment.
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