Today is the last day of 2014.
It felt like a frenetic year for me, and so I have to say that I’ve been really enjoying this holiday break. I needed the downtime. I needed the time to think and strategize. And I got all of that this holiday. (The only thing that would make this break even better would be some more snow on the mountains.)
I’m super excited for the new year and what’s ahead, but before getting into that, I thought it would be worthwhile to look back at what happened in 2014.
I was initially going to list out some of my thoughts, but then I figured that a better way would be to simply list out the most read Architect This City posts. That way it’s my (daily) thoughts, but curated according to what readers cared about most this past year.
Click here for the top 15 most read Architect This City posts of 2014. I’ve listed them on a “topics” page that I plan to update every year.
If you’re looking for some other 2014 themed reading material, I recommend also checking out the best #cityreads of 2014 by CityLab; the best articles of 2014 from ArchDaily; and what just happened? by venture capitalist Fred Wilson.
Happy new year everyone! Thanks for reading. See you in 2015.
Image: Family and friends lunch at Pizzeria Libretto, University
I continue to be amazed by the unmet demand for real estate (development) education here in Canada.
Following yesterday’s post on the real estate development process, I received a few emails from readers asking about the best university programs (MBA, MRED, etc.) and the best approaches for becoming a developer.
I also had a good conversation on Twitter, which covered off some details that I had left out from my post (for simplicity) and which resulted in me suggesting that a real estate development school needs to be started here in Toronto:
@donnelly_b I’m game. The Donnelly-Hassan Institute for the Dark Arts.
— SymmetryDevelopments (@symmetrydevelop)
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@symmetrydevelop @donnelly_b would be your first student. damn! could’ve stayed in Toronto if there was a program.
— Kuok-Kei Hong (@KuokKei)
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Now, part of the reason things are the way that they are, I think, is because the real estate industry has been historically dominated by private rich families. People didn’t go to school to learn how to be developers. They learned by doing and that was then passed down to the next generation. All it took was chutzpah.
But as the real estate industry continues to institutionalize and become run by pension funds and large publicly traded companies, I think the point of entry will also become increasingly institutionalized. And that’s where dedicated real estate programs will continue to come in.
I’ve spoken to a few people at the Rotman School – where I did my MBA – and there doesn’t seem to be a huge interest in a dedicated program such as a Master of Real Estate Development (they already offer real estate courses). It’s more of a “longer term” strategy.
But I think that’s a mistake.
I’m confident there’s strong demand from the student side, so hopefully a wealthy donor will step forward to help make this happen. The University of Toronto has both a great business school and a great architecture school. That feels like a great recipe for a first-in-kind joint degree offering.
Image: Urban Learning (via Flickr)
If you’re a regular reader of Architect This City, there are many things that you might know about me.
You might know that I was initially trained as an architect, but that I immediately transitioned into real estate development after grad school (where I studied both architecture and real estate).
After becoming a real estate developer, you might know that I completed an MBA with a focus on innovation and entrepreneurship (which happened by default as a result of the electives I ended up being interested in).
And finally, you might know, given the content of this blog and my startup history, that I have a significant interest in technology. More specifically though, you might know that my interest is in figuring out how technology will continue to infiltrate and impact “non-tech” industries such as real estate.
But what you might not know is how I even ended up in architecture and real estate in the first place. Unlike a lot of people who seem to have grown up wanting to be an architect – perhaps because they had a relative who was one – I didn’t decide to study architecture until a bit later on.
Growing up my primary interests were: art and computers.
During high school, my art teachers used to tell my parents that I was going to be an artist. And my computer teachers used to tell my parents that I was going to be a computer geek – or maybe they said computer scientist.
Maybe it had to do with timing and the emergence of the commercial internet in the 1990s, but computers sort of won out during that point in my life. I spent a lot of time building them from scratch, playing with software, and asking my mom not to pick up the phone because I was literally dialed-in to the internet.
So when it came time to enrol in university, I fairly effortlessly decided on computer science. It just seemed to make sense. But after about a year I realized that it wasn’t for me. I didn’t love programming like my classmates did and the thought of doing it for a living scared me.
At the same time, I felt like I needed to feed the artist in me. I wanted something both artistic and technical. So I decided to drop out of computer science and give architecture a try. It just seemed like the perfect marriage of my interests.
I immediately fell in love with architecture. And I spent the next 7 years studying it across 2 degrees.
But during that time, two things hit me. First, I came to the realization that real estate developers are the ones who really have the most say in terms of how our cities are built. And second, that technology was having a massive impact on business and life.
This told me that design alone wasn’t going to be enough. I also needed to engross myself in real estate, finance, business, and technology. So that’s what I set out to do. And I really enjoyed it. On the technology side, it felt like I was coming full circle in a way.
But today, I feel a bit like a 3 legged stool. There’s the design leg. The real estate/business leg. And the technology leg. And oftentimes I feel like life would be a lot simpler if I could just balance on one of those legs – instead of trying to stand on all three. But that’s simply not me.
These are my passions and I need all of them to stand-up.