The Bank of America Tower, by comparison, is fifty-five stories tall and contains 2.1 million square feet of space. John’s Terminal, when completed, will be twelve stories tall but contain 1.3 million square feet of usable space. Cook mentioned lofty core values he believes will define it: “health and wellness,” “flexibility and resiliency,” and “authenticity.” Also, today’s future is more horizontal. “Skyscraper mode,” he said, with a little shake of his head. Back then, the future was, among other things, vertical. Fifteen years ago, his firm designed the Bank of America Tower, which officially opened in 2010, after the financial crash. Cook has been thinking about the future of the workplace long enough to see more than one future come and go. He looked up at the not-quite-finished building: above the three tan brick stories of its original facade, nine gleaming floors of glass and steel rose, like the second tier of a wedding cake. Cook is tall and trim, with pale-blue eyes, and a practiced, confident bearing. “We’re into the future of the workplace,” Cook said, a few moments after shaking my hand. Oxford, the real-estate arm of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, acquired the building in 2017, and brought in COOKFOX to rehab it soon after. “It is why we continue investing in our offices around the world.”Ī few weeks ago, I took a tour of the place with the architect Rick Cook, a founding partner of COOKFOX Architects, and Dean Shapiro, a senior executive at Oxford Properties. “As Google moves toward a more flexible hybrid approach to work, coming together in person to collaborate and build community will remain an important part of our future,” Google’s chief financial officer, Ruth Porat, wrote in a blog post. Most Google employees were working remotely, and would continue to do so for some time. At the time, like every other large employer of a white-collar workforce, Google was asking itself medical, economic, and philosophical questions about the future of the workplace. The tech company’s executives said that they had important plans for the building. Last fall, Google announced its intention to purchase the terminal from the developer Oxford Properties for $2.1 billion-the biggest single-building commercial-real-estate deal in the city since the pandemic began. Built in 1934 by the New York Central Railroad, it was designed to hold two hundred and twenty-seven fully laden freight cars, which arrived and departed thirty feet above the ground, at the end point of the elevated tracks that would eventually become known as the High Line. Originally three stories tall and three blocks long, it runs north to south along West Street, in lower Manhattan. John’s Terminal, or tell you what it looks like. The average New Yorker couldn’t give you directions to St.
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