Today I am excited to announce that we are working with superkül architects on a new mid-rise condo project here in Toronto. Details about the site and project to follow.
I am excited about this for a few reasons.
It should go without saying that I love their work. Check out Compass House, SHIFT Cottage, Harbord Towns, and Oben Flats Queen East.
You may also notice that they work at a variety of different scales and have a lot of single-family / custom home work. This was important to us because one of our goals for this project is to create really great homes within a boutique building. Emphasis on home.
The other exciting piece is that one of the founding principals of superkül – Meg Graham – was one of my professors in architecture school. So there’s a sense of coming full circle.
This matters to me because when I became a developer I told myself that I was going to be the kind of developer that gave a shit about design and actively worked to improve the built environment.
I guess what I’m saying is that there’s a feeling of continuity. I haven’t forgotten where I came from, which was the world of architecture.
Image: Blok Design
Earlier this week I got a sneak peek of One Spadina Crescent – the new building for the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto.
The renovation and addition was designed by the Boston-based firm NADAAA. And let me tell you, it’s absolutely spectacular.
I was in a rush at the time and I didn’t have my real camera on me, but I managed to quickly grab this snap:
Coworking spaces are big business.
One of the biggest of those companies is WeWork. As of last month (November 2015), the company had raised close to a billion dollars from investors like JPMorgan Chase, Harvard Management, and Benchmark Capital, and was valued at $10 billion. (Remember though, this is in the private not public markets.)
If you’re unfamiliar with coworking spaces, check out this post from The Spaces. It’s a great demonstration of how beautiful these spaces can be.
All of this is interesting because it speaks to the changing nature of work. There are a lot of people freelancing, participating in the “online gig economy” and working on new ideas. And in many of these cases, they don’t want or need traditional office space and/or they want the community that many of these coworking spaces afford – both offline and online.
But it’s not just the office that is changing. It’s also potentially living spaces. Since 2014, WeWork has been talking about their new coliving concept, WeLive. The idea here is to combine smaller living spaces with larger common areas and create an overall live-work community. And they are not the only ones thinking about this.
Below is a building section of what this might look. It’s from a
Today I am excited to announce that we are working with superkül architects on a new mid-rise condo project here in Toronto. Details about the site and project to follow.
I am excited about this for a few reasons.
It should go without saying that I love their work. Check out Compass House, SHIFT Cottage, Harbord Towns, and Oben Flats Queen East.
You may also notice that they work at a variety of different scales and have a lot of single-family / custom home work. This was important to us because one of our goals for this project is to create really great homes within a boutique building. Emphasis on home.
The other exciting piece is that one of the founding principals of superkül – Meg Graham – was one of my professors in architecture school. So there’s a sense of coming full circle.
This matters to me because when I became a developer I told myself that I was going to be the kind of developer that gave a shit about design and actively worked to improve the built environment.
I guess what I’m saying is that there’s a feeling of continuity. I haven’t forgotten where I came from, which was the world of architecture.
Image: Blok Design
Earlier this week I got a sneak peek of One Spadina Crescent – the new building for the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto.
The renovation and addition was designed by the Boston-based firm NADAAA. And let me tell you, it’s absolutely spectacular.
I was in a rush at the time and I didn’t have my real camera on me, but I managed to quickly grab this snap:
Coworking spaces are big business.
One of the biggest of those companies is WeWork. As of last month (November 2015), the company had raised close to a billion dollars from investors like JPMorgan Chase, Harvard Management, and Benchmark Capital, and was valued at $10 billion. (Remember though, this is in the private not public markets.)
If you’re unfamiliar with coworking spaces, check out this post from The Spaces. It’s a great demonstration of how beautiful these spaces can be.
All of this is interesting because it speaks to the changing nature of work. There are a lot of people freelancing, participating in the “online gig economy” and working on new ideas. And in many of these cases, they don’t want or need traditional office space and/or they want the community that many of these coworking spaces afford – both offline and online.
But it’s not just the office that is changing. It’s also potentially living spaces. Since 2014, WeWork has been talking about their new coliving concept, WeLive. The idea here is to combine smaller living spaces with larger common areas and create an overall live-work community. And they are not the only ones thinking about this.
Below is a building section of what this might look. It’s from a
It’s of the third floor.
What you see in the middle are steps leading down to an “open bleacher space” that functions as a crit space and as an oculus that brings light into the core of the building. In the middle of the building is a large flex space.
Because the building effectively sits in the middle of Spadina Avenue, the windows on the right side (above) look directly up the street, as if you were standing in the middle of it. I wish I had betters photos to share with you all.
When you’re an architecture student, you spend almost all of your waking time in studio. I can certainly think of worse buildings to be cooped up in. I’m excited to see it in full swing come September.
Click here if you’d like to see renderings of the building.
It’s so interesting to see this concept come to fruition. Back in 2008 when I was in architecture school, I worked with a classmate of mine and designed a modular coliving apartment building. It was called the Philly Flex Dwelling and it worked like this:
The idea here was to start with standard floor plates and use a structural exoskeleton to minimize interior columns. This way you could insert whatever prefabricated modules you wanted and also re-purpose the structure should you want to change the building’s use in the future.
This is not that dissimilar from what was originally proposed for One Bloor West here in Toronto. Though the goal there was column-free retail spaces.
The yellow spaces are the shared common areas and the remaining spaces are the residential living “pods.” We also designed a “solar skin” that was perfectly tuned to the building’s orientation and location in Philadelphia. The idea here was to maximize winter sun (for heating) and minimize summer sun (to keep the building cool).
That was a fun project to work on.
It’s of the third floor.
What you see in the middle are steps leading down to an “open bleacher space” that functions as a crit space and as an oculus that brings light into the core of the building. In the middle of the building is a large flex space.
Because the building effectively sits in the middle of Spadina Avenue, the windows on the right side (above) look directly up the street, as if you were standing in the middle of it. I wish I had betters photos to share with you all.
When you’re an architecture student, you spend almost all of your waking time in studio. I can certainly think of worse buildings to be cooped up in. I’m excited to see it in full swing come September.
Click here if you’d like to see renderings of the building.
It’s so interesting to see this concept come to fruition. Back in 2008 when I was in architecture school, I worked with a classmate of mine and designed a modular coliving apartment building. It was called the Philly Flex Dwelling and it worked like this:
The idea here was to start with standard floor plates and use a structural exoskeleton to minimize interior columns. This way you could insert whatever prefabricated modules you wanted and also re-purpose the structure should you want to change the building’s use in the future.
This is not that dissimilar from what was originally proposed for One Bloor West here in Toronto. Though the goal there was column-free retail spaces.
The yellow spaces are the shared common areas and the remaining spaces are the residential living “pods.” We also designed a “solar skin” that was perfectly tuned to the building’s orientation and location in Philadelphia. The idea here was to maximize winter sun (for heating) and minimize summer sun (to keep the building cool).
That was a fun project to work on.
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