Office? What’s an Office?
On Vanderbilt Avenue and at the Navy Yard, a pair of huge workplaces open.
after 9/11, skeptics wondered whether tall office buildings had become too vulnerable to be viable. The answer came quickly: Skyscrapers would do just fine, thank you very much. The urge to compete, expand, and consolidate drove the construction of tens of millions of square feet of offices, rekindled the business district of lower Manhattan, and pushed midtown westward, toward Hudson Yards. Spurred by the desire to replace shabby, low-ceilinged offices in the area around Grand Central with a new crop of corporate headquarters, the city rezoned Midtown East, effectively demoting the Chrysler Building to the status of runt.
Now we face a double whammy of doubt—the first a matter of safety, the second of preference. Buildings sit empty because of their ability to collect and distribute a deadly virus, but far more worrisome is the prospect of companies happy to offload their overhead costs onto employees and a workforce that would rather stay home. Offices aren’t likely to fade away completely or all at once, though even a permanent 10 to 15 percent falloff in demand would shudder through New York’s economy. The (less probable) catastrophist’s version of that future is a massive shift away from collective workplaces, which would leave Manhattan with a skyline of shells. No natural law prevents a forest of high-rises from declining into a wilderness area, as New England’s 19th-century mills have, leaving a glut of emptiness that would challenge the city’s rationale for existence.
For now, bright new office space is still leaping into a gloomy market, 1.7 million square feet at One Vanderbilt and another 675,000 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s Dock 72, all that acreage temporarily inhabited by a population that would fit in a school bus. The first megalith to benefit from the process of rezoning Midtown East, One Vanderbilt, was designed by
Kohn Pedersen Fox, which plants towers in megalopolises around the world and is keen to preempt criticism that its designs would be equally at home in Taipei or Baku as in Manhattan. The firm recently gave New York the tallest skyscraper at Hudson Yards as well as its shorter sidekick. One Vanderbilt is more graceful than either, yet it shares with them a chunky aesthetic, with variously sized blocks squeezing together like a gang of sailors lashed to a mast.
As gargantuan money smelters go, this one aspires to be a good neighbor. The lobby opens toward Grand Central, and a corner hall acts as a public conduit from subway to street, siphoning foot traffic away from congested concourses underground. Conscious of dropping the new kid in an old neighborhood, the architects have paid their respects to the past. Early-20th-century buildings step away from the street as they go up; One Vanderbilt deconstructs the setbacks into vertical facets. Few architects working today are willing to emulate the giddy stainless-steel fantasies, terra-cotta reliefs, and sinewed statuary of a century ago. These architects have smuggled in whatever surface interest the cost-paring crew would allow. A canopy shoots from the lobby through the glass wall and out over the sidewalk, pulling even with Grand Central’s carved cornice. The scalloped terra-cotta shingles on the underside of that canopy pay homage to the tiled vaults inside the station. More glazed terra-cotta panels on the façade—shimmering, angled, and arranged in horizontal stripes—suggest a tower about to launch into motion.
I wish the architects had pushed these gestures further and owned the arrogance of overtopping Manhattan’s high-rise icons. Instead, One Vanderbilt is simultaneously bold and meek. Powerful in structure, held in place by a latticework of immense steel threads, the polite giant is careful not to muss up the skyline too much. The point of the building, after all, is to woo prospective tenants, and the way to do that is with lordly views, generous daylight, floors so spacious and unimpeded they could accommodate a sporting event, and an indoor climate caressed by a constant, undetectable artificial breeze. These things, plus the subbasement presence of five subway lines, Metro-North, and, eventually, the Long Island Rail Road, all help. The tower was already 65 percent leased before the pandemic struck, and three more tenants have signed up in the past few months. It seems entirely plausible that battalions of freshly vaccinated workers will someday squeeze back into hard pants and start occupying these fallow indoor acres.
When that happens, smaller, more nimble companies may be appreciating the virtues of being out of the midtown maelstrom and closer to employees willing to commute by bike, foot, shuttle, or ferry. Dock 72, the WeWork flagship co-working space, dominates the much lower skyline of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Long, narrow, and only 17 stories tall, it noses into Wallabout Bay as if en route to the open sea. Erected above a disused dry-dock system and lifted on V-shaped columns, the building appears ready to float above the coming decades’ glacier melt. In a precarious world, maybe it helps to be built on rubble.
“The dry dock is made of fill: slag, bricks, and timber and coal fragments,” says Sital Patel, one of the principals of the architecture firm S9, which designed Dock 72. “When we started driving piles, they were pulling up cannons.” Directing the weight down angled columns and gathering them into points helped structural engineers contend with the challenge of building on fill. It also created a ground-level public space sheltered by the building’s mass. Virtually every workstation offers views onto the gritty bustle of the Navy Yard, including the active dry dock next door, where vessels are repaired and painted. Dock 72 is at home in a former shipbuilders’ habitat; it’s a brawny, undemonstrative structure, framed in battleship-gray cement and trimmed in rusty red panels to emulate the look of weathered steel.
The building was born between disasters. It opened late last year, just as WeWork was imploding. Now, trimmed down and chastened, the company has a new pandemichoned pitch, geared to tenants who want to relinquish a Manhattan headquarters in favor of scattered offices and conference rooms. Truth is, nobody knows how all this will play out. I’ve spent virtually my whole career working from home and thought of it as a form of freedom. Yet I find it hard to believe that millions of what we once called office workers will embrace a lifestyle of kitchen command centers and laundry breaks. To look around a new office building these days is to watch the business world and the commercial-real-estate industry conduct a real-time experiment in social psychology. The outcome will affect us all. ■