This morning I woke up to an email from the Urban Ecology Agency of Barcelona. They are a public consortium dedicated to urban sustainability and made up of the City Council of Barcelona, the Municipal Council and Metropolitan Area of Barcelona, and the Barcelona Provincial… Read More
Yesterday it was announced that Tim Hortons would be moving its corporate headquarters from Oakville, Ontario to downtown Toronto. They’ll be taking 6,000 square meters of space in the PATH-connected Exchange Tower and moving all 400 employees by the end of this year. I’m more… Read More
Today’s post is going to be a short add-on to yesterday’s post about the sinking Millennium Tower in San Francisco. Today, the New York Times published the below map showing the areas of the city likely to “liquefy in an earthquake.” It goes on to note that “at… Read More
Many of you are probably aware of the 58-storey Millennium Tower in San Francisco which is estimated to have sunk about 17 inches and to have tilted about 14 inches to the west since it was built. Well today it was announced that they may… Read More
In December of last year, the City of Hamilton launched an RFP process to find a team (from the list of prequalified bidders) to develop a new urban community at Pier 8 along the waterfront. The ambition is somewhere around 1,500 new residential units and… Read More
I live in Toronto. When I am headed north to cottage country, I say that I am going up north. When the Florida snowbirds talk about escaping the winter, they usually say that they are headed down south. These geographic references are fairly straightforward. If a… Read More
There’s an old saying that we shape our buildings and environments and then they in turn shape us. Here is a fascinating research report about “the influence of physical elevation in buildings on risk preferences.” I discovered it through this MarketWatch article, which my friend John… Read More
I find regional accents fascinating. I generally think that Toronto has a fairly neutral accent. But then again, when I lived in Philadelphia, I used to notice the accident every time I came home. Maybe it is because I had adopted a bit of the… Read More
The New York Post has some interesting articles, here and here, on the growing retail vacancy problem in NYC. (Thank you Michael for the link in the comments this week.) The vacancy rate on Amsterdam Avenue in the Upper West Side is said to be… Read More
Over a year ago I wrote about a Kickstarter campaign that wanted to make a documentary to celebrate “the golden era of Canadian graphic design.” And after I wrote about it, my friend Dave Wex – who, like me, is a lover of all things Canada… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 