15 historic or adaptive reuse office projects for 2025

Southline is the repositioning of a three-story office and industrial building—the 16.6-acre former Boston Globe headquarters at 125 Morrissey Boulevard. The 700,000-sf retrofit is now a modern hub for creative office, laboratory, and retail uses.

It includes 360,000 sf of office space, 300,000 sf of flex/industrial space, retail, 100,000 sf of lab space, a 10,000-sf fitness center, 100-seat restaurant, and a micro craft brewery including an outdoor beer garden. 868 parking spaces and 200+ bike storage spaces are also available on-site. A multi-story atrium creates a central gathering area with food hall and collaborative meeting/gathering spaces. Southline aims to attract tenants who will stimulate growth in the fields of life science, high tech manufacturing, and technology.

The project’s biggest challenge was that the 700,000-sf building is wedged between major highways, requiring the team to stretch the project budget and planning to create a sustainable and inviting community. Southline Boston has attained LEED Core and Shell Silver certification, with a significant portion of points derived from diverting over 90% of the building’s structure and mass from waste streams. Improved site and connectivity including enhanced multi-modal paths linking neighborhoods and transit lines and stewardship of the neighboring parkland, Pattens Cove also contributed to certification.

Beacon remains committed to Southline’s Fitwel certification, supporting local businesses like Craft Food Hall, a budding restaurant concept offering healthy food, and Inner City Weightlifting, a fitness operator with a social justice and inclusion-based business supporting those reentering society.

Healthy indoor environmental quality is a high priority, with Real-Time IAQ monitoring showing Southline Boston’s air pollutant levels in 2023 and 2024 being 17% and 45% lower, respectively, than typical commercial office buildings. Annual water sampling based on the Harvard research framework, the 9 Foundations, reveals Southline Boston scored nine points higher than the median Healthy Building Benchmark of over 1,000 buildings.

On the Building Team:
Owner/Developer: Nordblom Company, Beacon Capital Partners 
Architect: Stantec 
Structural Eng: McNamara | Salvia 
Civil Eng: Howard Stein Hudson 
MEP Eng: BR+A Consulting Engineers 
Landscape Architect: Copley Wolff 
General Contractor: John Moriarty + Associates