And with Manhattan's office vacancy rate still sitting at around 18% in November, according to real-estate firm Colliers, office buildings like 160 Water Street might be in need of new life. A well-designed office environment demonstrates to an employee that their employer cares and prioritizes their comfort, health and well-being. These include a bowling alley, social lounges, a spa, and a rooftop bar.Īcross the country, vacant offices could be turned into 400,000 new apartments, according to a working paper by the economists Arpit Gupta, Candy Martinez, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh. Rent ranges from about $3,500 for a studio apartment to $7,500 for a two-bedroom.Īt a time when many are working from home and looking for so-called 'third places' to gather with friends and meet new people, 160 Water offers a slew of fancy amenities. Pictionary is a popular party game that also makes one of the most fun indoor team building activities for small groups. Each team member will take turns acting out a prompt, while the team tries to guess the word in under sixty seconds.

The apartments at 160 Water are all on the high end of market-rate. To play Charades, split the group into teams. We had to physically remove the floor slabs so that it became a true shaft,' Robert Fuller, a principal at Gensler who led the design of 160 Water, previously told Business Insider.īut the high cost of converting commercial buildings into homes means the homes aren't affordable for most. Senators who did not chair committees had to rent their own. 'We couldn't just wall it off and leave the floor slab. Office space in the Senate wing and Capitol terraces went entirely to committees and support staff. The shafts were among the most challenging aspects of the construction process. These workers experienced higher levels of productivity and engagement with their work. According to a Leesman survey of more than 250,000 companies, about 72 percent of workers said that natural light was a very important feature. This underscores the fact that being with colleagues in person is an invaluable part of the workplace experience, as is being part of a community that can’t be replaced. For this reason, implementing natural lighting into your office space should be a top priority. With food on site, there’s no excuse to depend on motorbikes delivering takeaways when cramming in those extra hours before a deadline.Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. The most important reasons employees see for coming into the office include meetings, socializing, connecting with colleagues, and building community, Pogue adds. But that’s just one example of how the office farm can be localised, from its food source to catering. Not all offices require a rice paddy in the entrance hall, like those at Pasona Group’s building in Tokyo. With support from agricultural specialists, the employees assist in its daily upkeep that contribute to the preparation of ingredients served at its on-site cafeterias. Buildings are by far the most permanent part of the workplace, and even in our most futuristic moments we cannot see them go away. Tomato vines are suspended above conference tables, lemon and passionfruit trees are used as partitions for meeting spaces, salad leaves are grown inside seminar rooms and bean sprouts are grown under benches. With advances in hydroponics – growing plants in something other than soil – New York firm Kono Designs created an urban farm inside a nine-story office building in Tokyo that harvests over 280 types of vegetables, fruits, herbs and flowers. But can these indoor gardens can also generate a sustainable food cycle for its employees? All of the resulting flowers and vegetation can be nice for workers to look at, reducing stress and tension. Its new developers told me it wasn't a very exciting one it was lined with perimeter offices that. Growing food in vertical cages, for example, or plant boxes and bags surrounding meeting desks. In a past life, 160 Water Street was an office building in New York City's financial district. In the age of fighting climate change, more corporations want to reduce their carbon footprint – and urban farms in offices could be the answer.

Office building inside with workers