The concept of adaptive reuse has emerged as a critical solution to urban challenges, transforming how architects and city planners approach existing buildings. As cities grapple with changing work patterns and housing demands, the question of how many lives a building can have has become increasingly relevant to sustainable urban development.
Historically, visionary architects have championed the idea of mixed-use buildings. Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation envisioned a "vertical neighborhood" that could seamlessly integrate housing, commerce, leisure, and collective spaces within a single structural framework. Around the same time, urban theorist Jane Jacobs argued that diversity of use creates safety, identity, and vibrant social life at street level. Later, architect Rem Koolhaas described skyscrapers in "Delirious New York" as early experiments in "vertical urbanism," capable of stacking incompatible programs under one roof.
In cities like Tokyo and Hong Kong, this vision of multiplicity matured into sophisticated hybrid buildings where different functions—transit hubs, retail spaces, offices, hotels, and residential units—coexist and interact continuously. These urban environments demonstrate the potential for buildings to serve multiple purposes simultaneously, creating dynamic spaces that respond to diverse needs throughout the day.
Despite these innovative visions, much of the 20th century saw a decisive shift toward functional separation. This process was shaped paradoxically by modernist planning principles heavily influenced by Le Corbusier's own ideas about zoning and programmatic order. Real estate speculation and growing automobile dependence reinforced this logic, encouraging cities to cluster similar activities together: offices concentrated in downtown cores, housing pushed to suburban peripheries, and commerce relegated to designated commercial corridors.
The skyscraper, once imagined as a vessel for urban diversity, gradually evolved into a highly specialized machine dedicated primarily to office work. By the 1970s and 1980s, global cities had consolidated this model into their central business districts, creating landscapes of glass towers optimized for efficiency, repetition, and corporate identity. These buildings' technical systems, floor plates, fire codes, and vertical circulation strategies were calibrated to a single rhythm—the predictable movement of large numbers of workers at fixed hours.
The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally dismantled the certainty of this office-centric model. Remote work arrangements and hybrid schedules shattered the assumption that millions of people must gather daily in the same towers, exposing the fragility and inefficiency of single-use office ecosystems. What once seemed like a rational urban model now appears increasingly disconnected from contemporary life, prompting cities worldwide to reconsider how these towers might be reused, diversified, and reintegrated into the everyday fabric of urban communities.
According to Edward Glaeser, chair of Harvard's economics department and author of "Survival of the City," and Carlo Ratti, director of MIT's Senseable City Lab and author of "The City of Tomorrow," New York alone has the equivalent of 26 Empire State Buildings' worth of empty office space following the pandemic. This represents a structural oversupply that no return-to-office policy is likely to reverse, signaling a fundamental shift in how urban spaces will be utilized.
Simultaneously, research by elevator manufacturer Schindler indicates that 80 percent of the buildings that will exist in 2050 are already standing today. This statistic underscores a crucial reality: the future city will not be built from scratch but will emerge through the transformation of existing structures. The challenge lies in adapting these buildings to accommodate new uses, new users, and more diverse patterns of daily activity.
In this context, Schindler points to a powerful premise: quality of life in future cities depends fundamentally on transforming existing buildings to support mixed-use environments. However, the ability to achieve successful adaptive reuse hinges on something often overlooked in architectural planning: vertical mobility systems. In single-use buildings, elevator systems are relatively straightforward, but in mixed-use environments, they become the central constraint that determines whether a reuse project is technically and economically feasible.
Traditional elevator design creates rigid segregation by carving separate shaft systems for different functions—offices, residential units, hotels, or retail spaces. While this approach effectively maintains privacy between user groups, it also locks towers into their original uses and consumes significant floor space for dedicated shafts. When office demand collapses, as it has in the post-pandemic era, these isolated elevator groups become underutilized infrastructure that cannot be redirected to serve other purposes.
Schindler's MetaCore system represents a technological solution to this flexibility challenge. The system replaces rigid elevator segregation with a single programmable core that can manage separation, privacy, and user experience dynamically through sophisticated software controls. One set of elevator cabins serves all building functions, adapting moment by moment to changing demand patterns throughout the day.
Dr. Florian Troesch, Head of Global Digital Business at Schindler, emphasizes that buildings need "vertical resilience"—the ability to adapt not just once, but repeatedly as urban demands shift over the coming decades. The MetaCore system enables this resilience by allowing residential users to receive different digital interfaces, cabin displays, and access credentials compared to office workers who use the same system minutes later. Hotel guests may be guided through entirely separate circulation paths, creating the illusion of dedicated systems while maximizing efficiency.
Frankfurt's Omniturm tower demonstrates this technology in practice. The building successfully integrates offices, residences, and amenities in a single structure, yet each user group experiences the building as if it were designed exclusively for their needs. Privacy is maintained not through physical separation but through software-defined segregation that preserves both efficiency and personalization. This approach makes mixed-use development commercially viable by addressing user expectations while maximizing building utilization.
Schindler's PORT technology operationalizes these concepts through advanced user recognition systems. Building occupants are identified via smartphone apps, access badges, or facial recognition the moment they enter the lobby. Elevators are then algorithmically assigned based on destination and user category, creating seamless experiences that feel personalized despite shared infrastructure. What appears to users as a dedicated residential or office elevator is actually a shared cabin that shifts operational modes throughout the day.
This technological flexibility proves especially valuable in existing building conversions. Many post-war office towers feature deep floor plates that are poorly suited to residential use without significant redesign. Schindler's research collaboration with architects explores hybrid strategies, such as branched duplex apartments positioned near building facades with commercial or shared spaces concentrated in the core areas. These configurations would be impossible with conventional elevator zoning but become feasible with programmable routing systems.
Beyond elevator technology, Schindler's research extends into comprehensive floor plate reorganization strategies that support mixed-use environments in buildings originally designed for offices. Working with architectural partners, the company has developed a catalog of design approaches that address various challenges in adaptive reuse, including critical issues like access to natural daylight. Many post-war towers feature homogeneous floor plates that require extensive redesign to support residential layouts and lifestyle needs.
The "Zigzag" design strategy exemplifies these innovative approaches. In this configuration, duplex residential units branch up and down from central circulation areas, pulling living spaces closer to exterior facades while creating interior voids that allow natural light to penetrate toward the building core. Some design models envision residential or hospitality programs wrapped around central shared interior zones, while other schemes stack or interlock different functions vertically, enabling offices, retail, and housing to coexist on the same or adjacent floors.
Advanced simulation technology underpins the entire adaptive reuse process. Before any renovation begins, Schindler analyzes comprehensive building data including population patterns, functional requirements, usage flows, passenger group segregation needs, and elevator system parameters. The resulting simulations reveal and model travel times, waiting periods, and interaction patterns across different user groups, enabling precise determination of how many residential units or additional functions a converted tower can successfully support.
Schindler MetaCore also provides crucial financial resilience for building owners. The system enables diversification of revenue streams, rapid response to changing market conditions, and extension of asset lifespans that might otherwise become obsolete. Instead of demolishing or abandoning outdated office towers, cities can reconfigure them to support housing, hospitality, coworking spaces, or public amenities while preserving embodied carbon and avoiding waste.
Elevator systems, traditionally viewed as a complex but secondary component of architecture, have emerged as strategic elements of urban transformation. Schindler reframes these systems as programmable infrastructure capable of absorbing uncertainty and enabling buildings to shift uses without requiring complete reconstruction of their vertical circulation cores. By unlocking the full potential of adaptive reuse, MetaCore technology helps keep construction materials in productive use, expands urban diversity, and ensures that buildings remain relevant and valuable across multiple generations.
Adaptive reuse ultimately represents the ability to envision future possibilities within existing architectural frameworks. Advanced solutions like Schindler MetaCore make these urban transformations technically and economically feasible, allowing cities to reinterpret buildings not as rigid monuments to past economic models but as flexible frameworks capable of supporting the evolving rhythms and diverse needs of contemporary urban life.
