It’s no secret that America’s offices and retail spaces are facing a time of great uncertainty.
For more than a year, the pandemic has forced everyone with flexible careers or health concerns to their homes, and most people aren’t in a rush to return to the office. Online shopping went from on the rise to becoming the norm, as did telecommuting.
So what happens to the country’s massive downtowns filled with multistory office buildings? Or to all the surviving brick-and-mortar stores packed with products we can easily buy online?
Tracy Hadden Loh made it her professional mission to find out. She’s a fellow with the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking at the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. She’s also a co-author of “The Great Real Estate Reset,” a report from the Brookings Institution that attempts to dissect where the real estate market goes from here.
The report’s broad recommendation for the real estate industry? Stop focusing on middle-class white families. It’s time for American real estate to pivot—hard—or risk “becoming a central contributor to the deterioration of American political and social cohesion.”
“Many of the guardrails we have in place are no longer suitable to guide us,” Loh says. “The reason we’ve had this status quo for so long is because it was working for some people. How much change there’s going to be is tied to how much discomfort stakeholders who were happy with the status quo are feeling, but also how much disturbance, reshuffling, and expanding there is of who’s at the table making the decisions about what needs to happen.”
Loh and her co-authors diagnosed five major trends coming together to disrupt real estate: segregation by race and income, the country’s demographic transformation, weakened regional housing markets, the future of work, and interruptions in the retail ecosystem. All five are in some way tied to the built environment, but the latter two may be the most impacted by COVID-19, our related shifts in lifestyle, and decades of ignoring whom our buildings serve.
It’s a clear opportunity for architects to step up and make their voices heard. Not just as designers who can update structures for a post-COVID world, but as advocates for change who have long lamented being left out of larger conversations regarding the built environment. Now more than ever, people’s ears are open.
“If we’re in a situation where a huge percentage of the existing built environment inventory in the United States is obsolete—it’s either the wrong product or in the wrong location or both—then there’s a major adaptive reuse challenge,” Loh says. “And the design profession is uniquely equipped to understand the details of that challenge and to help the public, the private sector, and elected officials understand what it’s going to take to adaptively reuse these obsolete spaces and structures in a way that is feasible, efficient, and equitable.”
Are Owners Ready for a Full-Scale Shift?
If that sounds daunting, it’s because it is. “No one individual is responsible or able to get this done,” Loh adds. “This is not going to be a personality-driven transition. We’re talking changing the rules to the extent that we’ll be playing a different game. That requires a movement; that requires the profession as a whole, working in collaboration across silos.”
Is the profession ready for such a movement? Perhaps more importantly, are the owners who make the decisions regarding these spaces ready to commit to such a reshaping?
Andrew Teng, AIA, is an architect and real estate consultant who specializes in multifamily residential and commercial developments. Like many designers during the pandemic, he’s been providing owners and developers with guidance on adapting to COVID-centric challenges. Also like many designers, he’s waiting to see how the people with the checkbooks ultimately respond to a post-pandemic world.
“Those of us who work with developers, we’re reacting to where they’re deciding to place their bets,” Teng says. “A lot of times, it comes down to developer dollars and them figuring out what the product they have is—and it is a product—and then we go ahead and try to implement that as best we can.” When it comes to post-COVID real estate, he says the goal posts are still moving.
That’s not to say that architects don’t speak up early and often on a project, especially when the challenges are as large as the ones surrounding COVID-19. He’s just learned throughout his career that a good architect hears their owner out and ultimately responds with the best design possible.
The economic response to COVID-19 has been a unique one. Unlike in a traditional recession, some sectors have thrived during COVID-19. Mom-and-pop restaurants were decimated, but tech and online retail exploded. The goal of most owners and developers, Teng says, will be to sense where spending is headed next and get in as soon as possible.
Designing for Experiences
When stores and restaurants began reopening in mid-2020, the focus was on adjusting to a world where a deadly virus raged. Plexiglass was added in front of cashiers; customers were urged to stay 6 feet apart. But it soon became clear that this was a Band-Aid solution, one that clients and designers would have to tackle together.
“We started being asked all these new and interesting reopening questions. ‘How do we reopen safely? How do we shift our business? People might not be coming back to our spaces or using them in the same way; what do we do with them?’” says Zachary Smith, AIA, an associate and senior architect at Bergmeyer and member of AIA’s Retail and Entertainment Knowledge Community Leadership Group.
Of course, no one expected the pandemic to continue for over a year and lead to thousands of retail locations going dark nationwide. But that doesn’t mean in-person shopping is gone forever. As doors close for some businesses, windows open for others, including formerly online-only retailers.
“The last five years have seen the clicks-to-bricks movement—Warby Parker, Everlane, Casper—slowly open physical locations,” Smith says. “It’s ironic because their business plan was originally based on not having physical space. But now there are open spaces and cheap rent. There are reasons to start moving faster.”
And that’s not just limited to name brands. Nobody wants a street full of empty storefronts, which means rent is also reasonable enough for another group of entrepreneurs: craft makers who got their start on Etsy and other online marketplaces during lockdown. Storefront owners have become far more amenable to hosting temporary pop-ups; anything to increase foot traffic.
“There’s an interesting opportunity for these true small businesses, these maker-type places, that would be well served by premium retail spaces getting a chance to go in and maybe make businesses out of it,” he says. “Maybe half of them are saying, ‘Sure, why not?’, but the other 50% could be the next clicks-to-bricks success story.”
What about getting people back to big-box stores, which are notoriously massive and unable to pivot on a dime? Smith points to unique levels of interactivity that companies like Nike adopted pre-pandemic with their in-store basketball courts, along with using some online tech to shape the shopping experience.
“We’re starting to talk about experiential design,” he says. “What is bringing people back to retail spaces now that they can buy anything in the world online? Maybe you walk into the Nike store and instead of walking up to a wall of 150 pairs of shoes, you’re seeing a virtual wall of six pairs, the ones Nike.com knows you want to see. How can we use all of these things that have been successful online and fully bleed them into the physical environment in a way that’s new, that’s an experience?"
Time to Disrupt Design Thinking
For many designers, pondering the future goes beyond just asking what architects can do to get work going forward. The pandemic has exposed untenable inequality—in regard to health, economic status, gender, and race, among others—that was already known to many and is now laid bare for all. That goes for the design world as well, where even the most well-intentioned spaces were created for a specific subset of people. There’s no better time than now to start making up for those flaws.
“Design thinking has to be disrupted,” says Angie Lee, AIA, partner and design director of interiors at FXCollaborative. “Most things in our society have to be disrupted, and the only silver lining that I can point to after this horrible year-plus is that it’s already happening.”
“We’ve been constantly chasing this Eurocentric, modernist curriculum that we were taught, most of us, in design school,” she adds. “Leaving that behind and shedding this kind of worship of Midcentury Modern and Bauhaus, things that are serving a straight white male typology, is hard to do. I’ve been doing this for almost 30 years now, and this whole time, without realizing it, I’ve been creating spaces for people who are not me.”
She’s thinking about design decisions big and small. About how, for decades, crash-test dummies were designed using the dimensions of the “average” male. About offices created for the comfort of that same man, with the thermostat set to a male-preferred temperature, something that’s prompted her female colleagues to wear ski jackets in the middle of summer. About redesigning FXCollaborative’s own office and absentmindedly asking her co-workers not to bring in “stinky,” often ethnic foods for lunch without considering how they could design a solution.
“There is such a thing called design that can handle those kinds of issues,” she says.
Lee has already seen progress among her clients. It’s often more about conversation than notable design decisions, but they’re still conversations that were not happening pre-2020.
“I don’t have to bring up health and wellness or biophilia; they’re bringing those issues to us,” she says. “When it comes to gender equity, they’re very receptive to listening to presentations that strive for a better balance in terms of not being too masculine, not being afraid of stereotypically feminine design gestures. It’s happening in very subtle but meaningful ways.”
In theory, that could be owners pleasantly placating more-progressive designers. But Lee doesn’t think so. She’s previously voiced concerns around how women or people of color may respond to a space; the response was often, “I don’t think that’s going to be an issue.” These days, they listen.
“I think our clients are understanding that there’s an importance to what they’re doing, whether it’s commercial, residential, or retail,” she says. “They’re helping to create an infrastructure, a community. And now we’re talking about who we’re designing for instead of just the usual suspects, the people you see in every rendering. There are small habits being formed, which are sometimes the most important kinds. They’re the entrees into bigger movements.”
