Property Manager Argues Empty Rooms Are Actually A Mindset Not A Vacancy Problem
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Manhattan Office Building Converts All Unused Conference Rooms Into Quote Collaborative Uncertainty Spaces
NEW YORK — A Midtown Manhattan office building whose conference room occupancy rates have fallen to approximately 14 percent of their 2019 levels has converted all seventeen of its unused conference rooms into what its property management company, Horizon Workplace Solutions, is calling “Collaborative Uncertainty Spaces,” which are rooms that have been stripped of their conference furniture and replaced with no furniture, their whiteboards and screens replaced with no whiteboards or screens, and their overhead lighting softened by what the property brochure calls “ambient luminosity calibrated for open cognitive states.”
The rooms are available to building tenants for what Horizon describes as “unstructured gathering, ideation, and collective ambiguity navigation.” The rooms have no booking system; they operate on a walk-in basis. They contain cushions in four sizes, a selection of analog writing tools (pencils, markers, crayons), several large pads of blank paper on the floor, and a single plant in each room described in the brochure as “a living anchor for the organic quality of the space.”
Horizon Workplace Solutions CEO Melinda Farnsworth-Oakes described the conversion at a press event Tuesday as “a radical acknowledgment that the era of the scheduled meeting in a defined space with a predefined agenda is over” and that “the future of collaborative work happens in the liminal zone between intention and outcome.” She added that the Collaborative Uncertainty Spaces were “not empty rooms” but rather “full rooms with empty structures,” which was “a fundamental distinction.”
A reporter asked what the difference was between a Collaborative Uncertainty Space and an empty room with cushions. Farnsworth-Oakes said the difference was “intentionality and framing.”
The Pricing
The Collaborative Uncertainty Spaces are available to building tenants at a rate of 45 dollars per person per session, which Horizon defines as three hours. Standard conference room rental in the building’s remaining booked rooms is 28 dollars per person per hour. The Collaborative Uncertainty Space pricing is accordingly, on an hourly basis, approximately 53 percent higher than standard conference room pricing, for a room with no furniture, no technology, and no defined purpose.
Farnsworth-Oakes acknowledged that the pricing was “premium relative to traditional conference room options” but said the premium reflected “the cognitive value of unbounded space” and “the scarcity of genuine uncertainty in the contemporary workplace.” She noted that “certainty is cheap and abundant” and that “productive uncertainty requires investment.”
Three tenants of the building, contacted Wednesday, said they had not yet used the Collaborative Uncertainty Spaces. One said he was “uncertain what he would do in there,” which Farnsworth-Oakes, when told this, described as “exactly the right starting point.” Another said the forty-five-dollar rate for sitting on a cushion with a crayon was “not a value proposition she could defend to her CFO.” A third said he had looked at one of the rooms through the glass door and felt “vaguely anxious,” which Farnsworth-Oakes said was “the anxiety of possibility, which is healthy.”
This kind of reframing of structural vacancy as philosophical opportunity is consistent with a long tradition of commercial real estate adaptation in which unused space is given a new conceptual frame rather than a new physical use, with the conceptual frame sometimes succeeding in attracting occupants and more often remaining a frame around an empty room.
The Occupancy Reality
The building’s overall commercial occupancy is, by Horizon’s own disclosure, 61 percent, down from 94 percent in 2019. The decline reflects the broader Manhattan commercial real estate situation following the pandemic-era shift toward hybrid work patterns. The seventeen conference rooms represent approximately 8,400 square feet of space that is not generating direct rental income.
The Collaborative Uncertainty Space conversion cost approximately 180,000 dollars, primarily in furniture removal, cushion procurement, and rebrand. If the spaces achieve their projected utilization rate of 40 percent of available hours, they will generate approximately 280,000 dollars in annual revenue, producing a payback period of approximately eight months.
The 40 percent utilization projection is, by Horizon’s own acknowledgment, “aspirational” and represents “the utilization achievable in an optimal market.” Current utilization, in the first two weeks of operation, is approximately 6 percent. Farnsworth-Oakes described the current utilization as “reflecting the market’s learning curve around new paradigms.”
This is consistent with a wider pattern in which commercial real estate projections for new concepts describe optimal performance rather than likely performance, producing optimistic business cases for concepts that then perform at their actual levels.
The Reviews
Several early users of the Collaborative Uncertainty Spaces have left internal feedback through the building’s app. Selected reviews include: “I sat in there for twenty minutes with a crayon and felt something, not sure what” (rated 4 stars); “My team used it for a brainstorming session and it was fine, basically we just sat on the floor” (3 stars); and “I walked in, felt immediately that I should be doing something, could not determine what, and left after eight minutes” (no star rating, described by the reviewer as “an appropriate response to uncertainty”).
For more on Manhattan office space innovation, see The Daily Mash for related London office culture coverage.
The seventeen rooms remain available. The cushions are there. The uncertainty is genuine.
SOURCE: https://sites.google.com/view/world-satire/united-kingdom-and-satire