I wasn't able to find an existing thread for this building - if I overlooked one, please feel free to merge. From Building Blocks:

11.30.2009 3:31 pm

St. Louis’ GenAmerica building is up for sale again

By Tim Logan

St. Louis Post-Dispatch



A major office building in downtown St. Louis is back on the market.



700 Market Street - known by many as the General American Building for the life insurer that used to be headquartered there - is getting some sprucing up in a renewed push to sell or lease it. The 128,000 square-foot building has been empty since 2004 when General American moved out the last of its employees.



It’s a landmark, literally. Designed by noted Modernist architect Philip Johnson, the 31-year old structure is the youngest building in St. Louis on the National Register of Historic Places. It also occupies a prime spot downtown, a full city block right between Busch Stadium and the new CityGarden.



These days, it is owned by New York-based Centaur Properties, which bought it in 2005 for $6.1 million. Several tenants have come close to buying it or moving in, but the deals fell through. Now, Centaur is pledging millions of dollars in upgrades and has hired local real estate brokers Balke Brown to market the building. They’re also seeking historic tax credits to help fund rehab work.

Full story, including current interior pics, at the link above.



-RBB

My dream for this building has always been to remake it as a contemporary art museum.



Not bloody likely, I know, but I can dream , can't I?

^I've always had the exact same thought. I think both of us have posted that around these parts several times.

Yup. Great minds, you know.

It would definitely be cool, but my preference would still be to have a few hundred people working there.

^A well-funded museum with lot's of staff.

I also thought - an aquarium!

Wouldn't that be cool across from City Garden!

Framer wrote:My dream for this building has always been to remake it as a contemporary art museum.



Not bloody likely, I know, but I can dream , can't I?

I have thought this for years, especially when I toured the building a few years ago.



This building is a money loser for office use. The floor plates do not lend themselves to office layouts, you are limited to how much furniture you ca put in the cantilevered corners ant it would be hard for any business to justify heating, cooling and maintaining the 6 story atrium.



However, as a museum the atrium would be a natural, the City Garden could bleed across the street through the outdoor plaza and straight in to the lobby space.



The lower building roof could be a fantastic rooftop garden looking towards Busch. The plaza space on the east side would be great for restaurant outdoor dining across the street from Shannon’s



Also I have been told that this was Philip Johnson’s last modern building, what a great venue for a modern art museum.



Or potentially a conservatory of music, with a concert hall in the atrium?



It just seems like it wants to be an institutional building, which might not generate as much daytime traffic as an office during the week, but would kill on weekends.

I have always loved this building so much. I really hope it gets saved no matter what the use. Though I would prefer a company to occupy it. For some reason I really want it to be the corporate offices of a midsized bio-tech/drugs/genetics company. It has just the right look of questionable defiance of reality that is good for that kind of thing. I suppose the same thing worked for financial companies.

This building is a money loser for office use. The floor plates do not lend themselves to office layouts, you are limited to how much furniture you ca put in the cantilevered corners ant it would be hard for any business to justify heating, cooling and maintaining the 6 story atrium.

urban myth. this building would well with a number of different layouts. Yes, the floorplates aren't the ideal rectangle/square, but either is the Savvis building on 40. This building needs a lot of work, but is certainly viable as an office headquarters, etc.

Grover wrote:^ Good call. The building is perfectly usable for office space. And do you really think it's the heating and cooling of the atrium that prevents a client from moving in?!?!?!? There are a few office buildings out their with atria (plural of atrium?) that do quite well.

Actually you might be surprised what kind of costs and considerations go into facilities selection.



With larger real estate transactions HR depts. seem to be charged with making the selection work. So after a president, CEO, CFO or board make like a certain building for various reasons, location, image, etc… it then it gets kicked down to HR or facilities management (depending on the size of the company) to “make it work” or give a recommendation.



HR folks are going to see how the floor plates work with culture and hierarchy of the company over the past decades this is trended towards large unencumbered floor plates which they can cram as many cubes as possible. If they can not fit departments on to one floor it can throw the whole plan it jeopardy. The sharp corners in this building certainly pound the load factor pretty hard. The floor plates are about 20,000 SF compare to Met Sq. which are about 30,000 SF, when you are forced to cut off the corners you end up with lower space efficiency, and at say 18 to 22 a sq. ft ( BOMA standards might force the price down) that ends up being a good deal of space your paying for and can’t really use, that is a hard sell.



The facilities people will look at the life cycle costs. If a single user tenant, the cost of the whole atrium will be shouldered by that user. Currently the large curtain wall windows that make of the drum are single pane glazed, very poor in retaining heat in the winter, and were fabricated before low “e” was a thought, therefore let in a lot of solar kind of like a green house. This is especially bad since the windows of the upper drum are vertical facing the southeast meaning that they absorb extreme amounts of heat in the summer from dawn to late afternoon. Most of the atriums that you see say in the Wells Fargo campus or at Ameren have slim vertical glass (double pane, low e) facing east and west, with no direct southern exposure. In addition, in those buildings the atriums attach separate buildings and are pressurized to deter air infiltration between, at GenAm, that could be the case I would have to research, but memory recalls a glass partition which would not lend itself to that use. Honestly I can’t think of any atrium volume (6 stories) to floor plate ratio that is larger, you do see it in hotels, but there is not the sheer surface of glass in those to allow in that kind of solar gain.



If it were not a single use tenant, the building owner would be taking a hit, they can charge for the sq. ft. of the atrium floor, but there would be no good way to pass along the cost of heating and cooling that volume to the tenants.



I was told the deflection thing by a former user; it may well be an urban legend.



There could be some information out there that I am not aware of that rectifies these concerns, but nothing I have seen or have been informed about has indicated that.



Keep in mind that this building also took years to finish, I cannot recall why, but the steel started going up in 1979, and stood there for several years barren.



Not saying that it cannot be used for office, just saying the building does not seem like it wants to be an office building. Going on 7 (or 8?) years vacant now, while downtowns absorption rate has been poor, there has been no shortage of suitors, someone is seeing something they don’t like.



Apologies for the dissertation.



"but either is the Savvis building on 40."



After the buy out of Brooks Fiber the now Savvis building was vacant for a while, making the floor plate work was one of the reasons, a broker I know sneered that it was an overblown Taj Mahal (I always liked it) and I would say that its design is much more accommodating to modern office design, also its atrium does not have the volume of glass as GenAm.



Useless trivia, the windows on the rear of the Savvis building spell out “Brooks Fiber” in Morse Code

The only thing that matters in facility selection for 99% of companies is where the CEO wants to live and work. The rest of the yahoos do whatever grunt work is necessary to make that dream come alive.

Beer City wrote:

Grover wrote:^ Good call. The building is perfectly usable for office space. And do you really think it's the heating and cooling of the atrium that prevents a client from moving in?!?!?!? There are a few office buildings out their with atria (plural of atrium?) that do quite well.

Actually you might be surprised what kind of costs and considerations go into facilities selection.



With larger real estate transactions HR depts. seem to be charged with making the selection work. So after a president, CEO, CFO or board make like a certain building for various reasons, location, image, etc… it then it gets kicked down to HR or facilities management (depending on the size of the company) to “make it work” or give a recommendation.



HR folks are going to see how the floor plates work with culture and hierarchy of the company over the past decades this is trended towards large unencumbered floor plates which they can cram as many cubes as possible. If they can not fit departments on to one floor it can throw the whole plan it jeopardy. The sharp corners in this building certainly pound the load factor pretty hard. The floor plates are about 20,000 SF compare to Met Sq. which are about 30,000 SF, when you are forced to cut off the corners you end up with lower space efficiency, and at say 18 to 22 a sq. ft ( BOMA standards might force the price down) that ends up being a good deal of space your paying for and can’t really use, that is a hard sell.



The facilities people will look at the life cycle costs. If a single user tenant, the cost of the whole atrium will be shouldered by that user. Currently the large curtain wall windows that make of the drum are single pane glazed, very poor in retaining heat in the winter, and were fabricated before low “e” was a thought, therefore let in a lot of solar kind of like a green house. This is especially bad since the windows of the upper drum are vertical facing the southeast meaning that they absorb extreme amounts of heat in the summer from dawn to late afternoon. Most of the atriums that you see say in the Wells Fargo campus or at Ameren have slim vertical glass (double pane, low e) facing east and west, with no direct southern exposure. In addition, in those buildings the atriums attach separate buildings and are pressurized to deter air infiltration between, at GenAm, that could be the case I would have to research, but memory recalls a glass partition which would not lend itself to that use. Honestly I can’t think of any atrium volume (6 stories) to floor plate ratio that is larger, you do see it in hotels, but there is not the sheer surface of glass in those to allow in that kind of solar gain.



If it were not a single use tenant, the building owner would be taking a hit, they can charge for the sq. ft. of the atrium floor, but there would be no good way to pass along the cost of heating and cooling that volume to the tenants.



I was told the deflection thing by a former user; it may well be an urban legend.



There could be some information out there that I am not aware of that rectifies these concerns, but nothing I have seen or have been informed about has indicated that.



Keep in mind that this building also took years to finish, I cannot recall why, but the steel started going up in 1979, and stood there for several years barren.



Not saying that it cannot be used for office, just saying the building does not seem like it wants to be an office building. Going on 7 (or 8?) years vacant now, while downtowns absorption rate has been poor, there has been no shortage of suitors, someone is seeing something they don’t like.



Apologies for the dissertation.

That's a very interesting analysis. My office looks out over the building and from a casual observation, I've always felt that the atrium area looked disproportionately large compared to the office space area. I don't think it necessarily looks this way from street level, but from up above, it really makes you think that the design of the building is fatally flawed for office space.



I'm actually not a big fan of the building aesthetically either, and wouldn't shed a tear if the block it sits on (along with the rest of the crap buildings on the south side of Market) could be redeveloped into something with a lot more vertical height and density.

Good god, how does it take $46 million to renovate that building? I sure hope they're not planning to dramatically change the architecture. Is this building protected in any way (landmark status, etc.)?

It depends how high tech they want to go, what kinda interior design will be needed to match there business needs and ect. It all adds up pretty quickly. Also depends on the buildings HVAC and electrical systems. Isn't this a pretty old place? Not all that familiar with it.

Re: the $8M, I guess I have to ask what people think is the risk of losing the HQ if the incentive is not approved? Also, with Laclede's recent purchase of Missouri Gas Energy, will some of those jobs come downtown eventually, that may not have fit in their current space? (I don't know much about this but those are my thoughts off the cuff)

framer wrote:Good god, how does it take $46 million to renovate that building? I sure hope they're not planning to dramatically change the architecture. Is this building protected in any way (landmark status, etc.)?

Big number but it probably reflects the entire cost - purchase, build out, furniture, move expenses, professional fees etc...