Office to Home — A Portland Story

Downtown Portland  has a problem.

While the new mayor has done a great job bringing life back downtown by addressing homelessness and cleaning the streets,  34% of downtown office space is still sitting empty. 

Office to Residential conversion has proven difficult. Most offices have awkward floor plate layouts, structural inefficiencies, and proforma failures that make demolition and new construction look much more realistic. 

But work from home is here to stay - and B/C class office towers are not only bleeding value but rendering parts of vibrant city lifeless. 

The current state of the One Financial Building

By PortlandSaint - Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=158138042

So let’s dream big. Portland’s One Financial Center  (a building valued at $114 million in 2020, now assessed at $33.6 million ) can get a new life. We’re calling it The Morrison. 

One Financial Center has deep floor plates - designed to support perimeter offices and wide internal circulation loops. This is very different from the typical residential floor plate, where shallower layouts allow lighting to penetrate throughout every unit.

To allow light to penetrate deeper into the unit, we imagined removing the existing glazing and pushing the conditioned wall inward (12 feet on the long sides, 6 on the short) giving every resident an outdoor terrace.

The result? 237 residences, generous communal spaces on every floor and a building with life in it again.

At the ground floor, we opened the entry experience by creating a double height, retail lined, paseo with a skylight leading you to the building core. 

People return. The ground floor activates. One corner of Downtown Portland becomes alive again.