Back in undergrad, I spent a summer living and working in Taipei and Hong Kong. It was my first time being in either of these cities and I absolutely loved it. I was studying architecture. I was really developing my love of big cities. And these felt like two very real and big cities.

Below is a cheesy tourist photo that I paid someone to take of me from the Kowloon Pier. I still have access to it because obviously my mom has it framed and prominently displayed in her kitchen:

I'm sharing this photo because one of the things that really stood out to me about Hong Kong, in particular, was how they lit their buildings. There were neon signs (which is something that Hong Kong is, or least was, famous for); lights shining up into the sky (bad, I know); and full light shows and animations across entire building elevations.

I immediately thought to myself: "Why don't we have fun like this? Especially considering that Toronto can get kind of dark during the winter."

Well, some twenty years later, we are now starting to have more lights. We fought hard for our placemaking sign at Junction House. The CN Tower has since been illuminated. And most recently, we got 160 Front Street West. But it turns out that building lights can be a little divisive:

My view is exactly what it was when I first landed in hot and humid Hong Kong. And so I respectfully disagree with Jocelyn Squires (though I have great admiration for her work). Architectural lighting adds color and dynamism to our cities. It can also help our cities from all looking the same.

Let's stop being so conservative and have some fun. Nice work, 160 Front.

The Quay Quarter Tower in Sydney has been just been awarded the "best new tall building" of 2023 by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH). Deigned by 3XN and BVN, it's a great adaptive reuse story.

The project is a renovation and expansion of an existing 1970s building. And the team managed to retain 65% of the original structure (slabs, columns, and beams) and 95% of the original core.

This results, according to their calculation, in 12,000 tons of embodied carbon savings. The equivalent of 35,000 flights between Sydney and Melbourne. At the same time, the team managed to add 45,000 m2 of new floor area to the site by grafting new slabs onto the existing ones.

But let's get back to these carbon savings.

According to this site, there are 37 direct fights between Sydney and Melbourne each day. That's about 13,505 flights per year, meaning that the carbon savings from not fully demolishing this building (and starting fresh) are equal to about 2.6 years of people not flying back and forth between these two cities.

If you consider how long buildings typically last (this one was relatively young at under 50 years), it kind of makes buildings seem less bad. Of course, we're only talking about and comparing embodied carbon. There's also the ongoing operation of the building.

In any event, a deserving project. Congrats to the team. For more on the project, click here.

Photo via Dezeen

Designer Thomas Heatherwick has a book coming out this week that is about how most buildings suck:

Heatherwick’s reticence makes his latest work more surprising. He is launching a 10-year campaign against the “catastrophe” of how buildings are built. Our cities, he argues, are in the grip of an “epidemic of boringness”. Most modern buildings are too flat, too plain, too straight, too shiny, too monotonous, too anonymous and too serious. They make us unhappy and ill, they make us not want to come into the office.

In his book Humanise, out on Thursday, Heatherwick derides architects as members of a modernist “cult”, which indoctrinates them during their seven-year training into thinking they don’t need the public’s approval. The result is the UK’s commercial buildings are so unloved that they have an average lifespan of perhaps 50 years, leading to huge carbon emissions as they are replaced.

I haven't read it yet, but something tells me that I'll probably agree with some/many aspects of the book and be annoyed by others.

What I'll likely agree with is that our cities should be more playful, beautiful, and creative. They should be more human. And we should be more daring.

But what I'll likely be annoyed by is the impracticality of the proposed approach(es). There are markets. There exists money. And there are reasons why many of Heatherwick's projects are "luxury" ones.

Or maybe I'm just being cynical and I should wait and see.

Here's a link to the book.