I find it interesting people converted factories and workshops and such into housing (lofts etc) but developing places built for humans is somehow harder. I feel like most of this is FUD for redevelopment subsidies by developers. A good friend is a Gehry apprenticed professor of architecture that specialized in sky scrapers, residential and commercial, and he thinks it’s technically not a challenge. They are built with drop ceilings and modularity built in mind so segmenting into smaller spaces with plumbing and other amenities isn’t a challenge. Most offer floor to ceiling windows around a core of elevator banks so the “no windows” thing is on the surface absurd.
> A good friend is a Gehry apprenticed professor of architecture that specialized in sky scrapers, residential and commercial, and he thinks it’s technically not a challenge.
It's not a technical challenge, it's an economic challenge. For the large floorplate postwar buildings, the cost of the conversion usually doesn't make sense unless the rents or prices the units can fetch is very high, often higher than local wages can support.
> Most offer floor to ceiling windows around a core of elevator banks so the “no windows” thing is on the surface absurd.
A floor to ceiling window isn't operable. Many of those would have to be replaced with Windows that are operable.
