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The U.S. office vacancy rate hit a record high of 20.1% in the second quarter of 2024, according to ratings service Moody’s.

Big cities such as Chicago have created incentives to get developers to help fund office-to-residential conversions to fill all of that empty space, but a stubborn problem persists: Many older buildings have elevator cores that serve only fixed floors for fixed purposes, with no easy way to change their functionality.

Schindler Elevator is now pitching a new approach for elevator management. MetaCore is a suite of operations software and internet of things sensors that can react to specific people entering a building and prepare elevators as needed, with service to offices, retail, hotels or residences. All these users can share elevators, since MetaCore can optimize the number of lifts needed. Smartphones, chip cards or temporary access codes can be used to identify users and their likely destinations. MetaCore is an evolution of Schindler’s PORT technology, and can quickly determine access permissions and indicates the elevator a user should take to reach their destination automatically.

MetaCore allows one elevator core to be used for office, residential, hotel or mixed uses and prepares the lift via IoT sensors.
Illustration courtesy of Schindler
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Mixed-use by Floor

While many buildings that have offices have long had other uses, retail beyond the first two floors or even hotel or residential in higher floors is typically served by another elevator core.

“The problem we had is that we basically have many very mono-functional buildings, mainly office towers in the city,” says Florian Trösch, vice president for PORT technology at Schindler Group. “The elevator has one task. We bring everybody in in the morning and everybody out in the evening, as efficient as possible. Flexible multi-use was really not a concept as part of it.”

Trösch says the MetaCore technology supports a “vertical village” concept that not only allows one core to serve multiple uses, but even opens up individual floors to have both offices and residential sections. The system can also reconfigure the elevator car to custom applications, with different lighting and music playing.

The 45-story Omniturm building in Frankfurt, Germany, is the first skyscraper to use MetaCore to connect people via a digital network. It serves 2,200 users—workers, visitors and residents—each day. Separate lobbies are able to use the same elevator core.

BIG’s design for Omniturm is a prism of stacked apartments that emphasizes the tower’s mixed-use spaces, with two gestures that alter the overall profile where the programs change. The lower slabs extend in two directions, producing cantilevers that serve as terraces and canopies. The eight residential floor plates about halfway up the tower extend out, creating a series of terraced and outdoor spaces, all served by one bank of MetaCore elevators.

“Frankfurt specifically just has mono-programmatic towers historically [speaking]. Either you work in a tower or you live in a tower, but very rarely have they ever done mixed use,” says Kai-Uwe Bergmann, a partner at BIG.

“That’s just a complexity level that they don’t know how to finance, they don’t have a lot of developers that do both,” notes Bergmann. “So it’s very fascinating that an American developer, Tishman-Speyer, goes to Frankfurt and then decides to build a mixed-use project where there are 49 residences sandwiched in between two office sections.”