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If only London’s empty office space could be used to fix to its housing shortage, says David Weatherhead of HOK

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Is the future of the office residential? With more people deciding to work from home, and more companies looking to optimise their rental space and becoming increasingly workplace savvy, a lot of real estate is now sitting unused.

Currently across London, there are an estimated 1.3 million sq m of unoccupied offices. That would be around 1 km x 1 km of floor space if represented as a single-storey building. Stack that space in blocks, and you have the highly conceptual opportunity to imagine eight x 300-storey towers, each 1km tall, vividly representing the unused potential that lies within our existing building fabric.

Coming down to earth, that’s enough space to create a potential 20,000 affordable homes, based on an average 50 sq m sized flat. That number of new flats would, incidentally, more than help in getting the estimated 8,000 homeless people off London’s streets.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all real-estate projects had an inherent flexibility of design that would smoothly facilitate such necessary changes in the future?

 

David Weatherhead

David, who has designed a variety of projects across the world, joined HOK in London in 2016 as a senior project designer and is now one of the practice’s London design principals. He has spent 15 years as a practicing architect in London, led his own practice in Sweden and also worked in San Francisco.