I just finished going through the work of Studio North. My friend Peter introduced me to them through this Globe article.
They are a Calgary-based design-build practice that have completed a number of laneway houses, as well as bigger projects such as this 34 unit townhouse project in Canmore, Alberta.
What (not surprisingly) caught my attention was their focus on laneway/accessory dwellings. Pictured above is their Bowling Lane House in Crescent Heights, Calgary.
It’s a 700 sf one-bedroom house that sits behind a 1920′s heritage house. Here is an axonometric of that relationship (the existing house was made transparent):
Here is an elevation from the main street. Look at how neatly it tucks behind the existing house. All you really notice is the garage of Bowling Lane House.
Here is how Bowling Lane House fits into its laneway.
And here are two images of the double height space that they managed to create within this 700 sf house.
Notwithstanding that this is a wider lot than what you might typically find in Toronto, it is precisely the kind of housing – both in terms of design quality and scale – that I was trying to create with Mackay Laneway House. It’s also where I was planning to move.
Kudos to the Studio North team for driving this initiative in Calgary. You can check out the rest of their projects here. They have a number of other laneway houses within their portfolio. And all of them are beautiful.
All images from Studio North.
The Globe and Mail recently published an article about Canada’s highest paid workers. It uses census data spanning 2005 to 2015.
There’s a feature that allows you to enter your before tax income, your location, and your gender to see how you compare to “the 1 percent.”
But in case you don’t feel like doing that, here’s the minimum income required to be in the top 1 percent as of 2015 for each province/territory:
And here are the communities where the 1% saw the biggest pay increases:
Canada is a resource rich country. And one of the things that commonly happens to countries with a lot of resources is that they begin to myopically focus on the immediate gains from resources at the expense of long term innovation and economic development.
This is known as the “resource curse.”
The Martin Prosperity Institute here in Toronto recently published a report that looks at this exact topic: Canada’s urban competitiveness through the lenses of its resource economy and its knowledge economy. In the end, Richard Florida and Greg Spencer conclude that two can and should work together, but that we need to stop neglecting our cities:
“The oil and gas industry is not necessarily a constraint on the creative economy, but in the past decade or so it has come to dominate thinking around economic development policy-making. It is time to use the resources from the energy economy to build a more secure future as an urban knowledge economy. We can also use talent and technology to deepen and expand the resource economy.”
And one of their key recommendation is something I have argued for many times here on Architect This City:
“A New Federalism for Cities: It is time to give cities the taxing and spending powers they require. Cities must be given more control over their own destinies if they are to prosper in the 21st century.”
Now, here are a few interesting charts from the report.
This first one looks at the relationship between a city’s population and its creativity levels. The two are positively correlated, which means that, in this context, bigger is better.
This second one splits Canada in half – east and west – and then looks at how average income levels are affected by creativity levels (the knowledge economy). Here we see that in eastern cities, income levels are positively correlated with creativity levels. But in western cities, changing creativity levels have almost no impact on income levels.
Finally, this third chart compares the relationship between oil and gas employment (LQ = location quotient) and average income levels. What it finds is that income levels and oil and gas employment are positively correlated in the west, but there’s almost no relationship in eastern cities.
The way to read this chart is to think of the LQ as the employment multiple relative to the national average. So for example, a LQ = 10 means that the oil and gas employment levels are 10 times the national average. As you probably guessed, the pink dot way out on the right is Fort McMurray.
If you’d like to read the entire report, you can do that here. I hope that our new Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, will read reports like this and spend more of his efforts investing in our knowledge economy – which means investing in our cities.
I just finished going through the work of Studio North. My friend Peter introduced me to them through this Globe article.
They are a Calgary-based design-build practice that have completed a number of laneway houses, as well as bigger projects such as this 34 unit townhouse project in Canmore, Alberta.
What (not surprisingly) caught my attention was their focus on laneway/accessory dwellings. Pictured above is their Bowling Lane House in Crescent Heights, Calgary.
It’s a 700 sf one-bedroom house that sits behind a 1920′s heritage house. Here is an axonometric of that relationship (the existing house was made transparent):
Here is an elevation from the main street. Look at how neatly it tucks behind the existing house. All you really notice is the garage of Bowling Lane House.
Here is how Bowling Lane House fits into its laneway.
And here are two images of the double height space that they managed to create within this 700 sf house.
Notwithstanding that this is a wider lot than what you might typically find in Toronto, it is precisely the kind of housing – both in terms of design quality and scale – that I was trying to create with Mackay Laneway House. It’s also where I was planning to move.
Kudos to the Studio North team for driving this initiative in Calgary. You can check out the rest of their projects here. They have a number of other laneway houses within their portfolio. And all of them are beautiful.
All images from Studio North.
The Globe and Mail recently published an article about Canada’s highest paid workers. It uses census data spanning 2005 to 2015.
There’s a feature that allows you to enter your before tax income, your location, and your gender to see how you compare to “the 1 percent.”
But in case you don’t feel like doing that, here’s the minimum income required to be in the top 1 percent as of 2015 for each province/territory:
And here are the communities where the 1% saw the biggest pay increases:
Canada is a resource rich country. And one of the things that commonly happens to countries with a lot of resources is that they begin to myopically focus on the immediate gains from resources at the expense of long term innovation and economic development.
This is known as the “resource curse.”
The Martin Prosperity Institute here in Toronto recently published a report that looks at this exact topic: Canada’s urban competitiveness through the lenses of its resource economy and its knowledge economy. In the end, Richard Florida and Greg Spencer conclude that two can and should work together, but that we need to stop neglecting our cities:
“The oil and gas industry is not necessarily a constraint on the creative economy, but in the past decade or so it has come to dominate thinking around economic development policy-making. It is time to use the resources from the energy economy to build a more secure future as an urban knowledge economy. We can also use talent and technology to deepen and expand the resource economy.”
And one of their key recommendation is something I have argued for many times here on Architect This City:
“A New Federalism for Cities: It is time to give cities the taxing and spending powers they require. Cities must be given more control over their own destinies if they are to prosper in the 21st century.”
Now, here are a few interesting charts from the report.
This first one looks at the relationship between a city’s population and its creativity levels. The two are positively correlated, which means that, in this context, bigger is better.
This second one splits Canada in half – east and west – and then looks at how average income levels are affected by creativity levels (the knowledge economy). Here we see that in eastern cities, income levels are positively correlated with creativity levels. But in western cities, changing creativity levels have almost no impact on income levels.
Finally, this third chart compares the relationship between oil and gas employment (LQ = location quotient) and average income levels. What it finds is that income levels and oil and gas employment are positively correlated in the west, but there’s almost no relationship in eastern cities.
The way to read this chart is to think of the LQ as the employment multiple relative to the national average. So for example, a LQ = 10 means that the oil and gas employment levels are 10 times the national average. As you probably guessed, the pink dot way out on the right is Fort McMurray.
If you’d like to read the entire report, you can do that here. I hope that our new Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, will read reports like this and spend more of his efforts investing in our knowledge economy – which means investing in our cities.
The data certainly underscores how important commodities have been for growing individual incomes. Alberta, Newfoundland, and Saskatchewan are resource-rich provinces.
However, the above data doesn’t capture the collapse of oil prices in 2014. So it would be important to also consider what this data looks like outside of a commodities boom.
Charts: The Globe and Mail
The data certainly underscores how important commodities have been for growing individual incomes. Alberta, Newfoundland, and Saskatchewan are resource-rich provinces.
However, the above data doesn’t capture the collapse of oil prices in 2014. So it would be important to also consider what this data looks like outside of a commodities boom.
Charts: The Globe and Mail
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