New York City construction scare highlights the challenges of converting offices into housing

FastCompany: When two steel columns buckled this week inside the former Pfizer headquarters in midtown Manhattan, the scare prompted evacuations and halted work on one of the nation’s largest office-to-apartment conversions . It also highlighted the complex engineering behind adaptive reuse projects, which have become increasingly popular as officials try to tackle a nationwide housing shortage by transforming offices that have sat underused since the COVID-19 pandemic .

The plans call for turning two office buildings — one built in 1909, the other in the 1960s — into about 1,600 apartments by adding more than a dozen stories atop the older structure and redesigning and expanding the other. The buckling occurred on the 21st floor of the newer structure, and crews have installed temporary supports as officials investigate. Engineering experts said the conversion project is complex and poses many challenges, which include making sure older buildings can safely support new loads and carving up office floors to accommodate residential living.

But none said the high-profile setback should make people doubt the ability of engineers to complete such projects. “I don’t think it really brings into question our understanding of how to do something like this,” said Ben Schafer, a structural engineering professor at Johns Hopkins University. How do you build a new tower on top of an old one? On its website highlighting the midtown project, adaptive reuse firm Collaborative Construction Management says the nine-story building from 1909 will be “threaded through” with a new addition of about 30 stories of poured concrete.

Schafer, who is not involved with the undertaking, said the likely approach is to have the century-old building continue to carry its own weight while building a new structural system to support additions. “My interpretation would be that they’re going to leave that building carrying its own load, and they’re just going to poke holes in it so that they can take the load from the building that they’ve put above it and bring it all the way down to the foundation,” Schafer said.

Schafer said construction on the other tower presents a different challenge: punching holes in the existing floor plate to bring light into apartments, while also ensuring that the steel frame can support the newly added loads. City officials have not determined what caused the columns to buckle. But both Schafer and Emily Guglielmo, a San Francisco-based structural engineer, believe the failure likely resulted from the added load. Spokespersons for MetroLoft, the project developer, didn’t respond to requests for comment Thursday.

But Nathan Berman, the firm’s founder, acknowledged in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that the added weight from widening the top 15 or so floors of the building likely caused the damage. Guglielmo thinks that either the original design assumptions were misunderstood, something went wrong during the design or construction process, or construction crews overloaded or weakened the structure.

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The article addresses significant challenges in a growing trend of adaptive reuse in urban environments, which is highly relevant to brand strategy professionals focused on sustainability and urban development.