Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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Category: Architecture

  • More lights on buildings!

    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.

  • Best new tall building of 2023

    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

  • Epidemic of boringness

    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.

  • World’s largest floating infinity pool

    Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron has just completed what is being called the world’s largest floating infinity pool.

    Located in Lake Como at The Mandarin Oriental, the pool — which is built out of dark Cardoso stone in order to blend in seamlessly with the lake — was fabricated off-site in Finland and then assembled in Italy.

    In order to reduce the impact of waves, the pool has also been carefully secured to the bottom of the lake.

    I tried to find a cool video that I could share here, but nothing came up. So instead, you’re going to have to check out the photos that HdM has on their website and that Wallpaper shared over here.

    As far as floating infinity pools go, I can confidently say that this is the most beautiful one that I have ever seen.

  • First cross-laminated timber apartment building in NYC

    At the end of 2020, I wrote about a cross-laminated timber apartment building that Joanne and Fred Wilson were building in Brooklyn at 383 Greene Street.

    Well, that project is now complete and stabilized, and it turns out that it was the first CLT apartment building ever built in NYC, which is quite an accomplishment.

    On her blog, Joanne describes the project as being a “labor of love”, and that certainly sounds right. But they are now also onto their next CLT apartment building at 122 Waverly Avenue (called Frame 122).

    This would suggest that whatever their development model is, it is working for them. My assumption is that they want to both make our cities more sustainable and own high-quality rental assets for the long-term (possibly forever).

    If you’d like to see how 122 Waverly was assembled, here’s a short video that Joanne recently posted on her blog:

  • La tour Montparnasse at ground level

    The Tour Montparnasse in Paris recently turned 50. We spoke about that over here. But having visited the tower last week, including its top observation deck, I can now confidently say that I understand why many/most Parisians dislike it so much.

    It is a complex that could be in any city in the world and it is clear that it has been seeing disinvestment for quite some time (presumably due to its upcoming renovation). 

    However, a lot of the discussion seems to be focused on how its built form is a towering contrast to the rest of Paris. This is, of course, correct. But the same is true of the Eiffel Tower. One big and important difference is how these two towers meet the ground.

    La Tour Eiffel sits in a beautiful landscaped park where people sit and hang out (photo by me):

    Whereas the Tour Montparnasse is disconnected from its surrounding context. It feels like that train station on the wrong side of town (photos from Google Streetview):

    So it’s no wonder that its height gets picked on. What is implicit in this treatment of the ground plane is a belief that this tower is not worthy of celebrating. It does not deserve a beautiful park. And it does not deserve to be a ceremonial view terminus like every other icon in Paris.

    Thankfully, the current design for its renovation appears to address this (rendering via Nouvelle AOM):

    And this is arguably the most important design move. Ironically, what happens at the ground level could be what makes people finally appreciate what happens up top.

  • Hawaii’s miracle house

    Some of you have probably come across this photo online (this particular one is via Civil Beat):

    It is a photo of what looks to be the only remaining house in Lahaina, following Hawaii’s devastating wildfires this month.

    Naturally this raises an important question: Why was this house spared?

    The likely answer is that it was a combination of things. But some believe that the single biggest factor was the non-combustible zone that the owners had inadvertently created around the perimeter of their home.

    They did it to direct water and avoid possible termite damage, but it turns out that this is what most jurisdictions recommend in order to reduce wildfire risk.

    Here in Canada, FireSmart recommends a 1.5 meter non-combustible zone.

    So while luck surely played a part, so too did design.

  • Urbanism versus architecture

    Good morning from rainy New Hampshire.

    It’s been raining all morning, but apparently there is an ocean hidden in the above picture. We also got in after dark and so all I really saw was what I could see on the drive from the airport.

    Whenever I am reminded that the vast majority of built form in North America is car-oriented in nature, I can’t help but think of how sticky all of this is going to be.

    Witold Rybczynski put it accurately when he said, “urbanism and architecture observe different time lines.” Buildings may take forever to build, but relative to urban form, they actually change pretty quickly.

    New materials and styles emerge, and so do new buildings. But the streets that surround them change so slowly, that for all intents and purposes, they mostly don’t change.

    What that means is that, for better or for worse, most of what we see is likely to persist. No wonder there is an arms race going on with autonomous vehicles.

  • Real estate is a project-based business

    A friend of mine just sent me this blog post from the venture capital firm, Shadow Ventures. They specialize in the built environment (i.e. real estate and construction) and the post is called, “What McKinsey gets wrong about the built environment.” Here’s one of the points that they make:

    We are project based. While we are much larger, the most similar business is the movie industry. Project based, different source of funding/budget every time, the team changes (but we have our faves).

    This is very true. Oftentimes what happens in real estate is that you start with an opportunity. Something like, “buy this building, fix it up, and then sell it for more.” If the opportunity sounds compelling, a common approach is to then “get control of the asset and figure out how to capitalize it.”

    What this means is a conditional deal so that you can (1) do your due diligence and (2) figure out how to pay for it. This gets back to the three-legged stool that we’ve spoken about before. To do real estate stuff you basically need 3 things: a piece of real estate, relevant experience, and, of course, some money.

    This speaks to the entrepreneurial nature of real estate. But it also speaks to why it is maybe unfair to evaluate the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry as you might the automotive industry. The auto industry doesn’t capitalize and make each car slightly differently.

    This is one of the many things that makes real estate unique. And it’s why we have seen an enduring effort to figure out the “productization” of housing. It’s about being less project based.

  • Urban families

    We are getting ready for first occupancies at Junction House and it is exciting to see how many young families — with children — are looking forward to moving into the building’s larger 2-storey suites. (These are the suites that gave the project its name — Junction House.)

    From the outset, this was always a part of our development thesis. You can’t, or at least it’s very difficult, to pre-sell an entire building of larger suites in Toronto. But we figured that in a submarket like the Junction, which is very popular with young families, that there had to be some buyers who would want a house-like residence.

    Meaning, two floors of living spaces, upstairs bedrooms (better acoustic separation), larger living spaces, and a terrace for BBQing and gardening, among other things.

    We are now seeing this play out with the wonderful people coming in for their pre-delivery inspections, and it’s a really nice thing to see. Not only as a developer, but as a dedicated urbanite and lover of Toronto. I am not suggesting that it’s for everyone. But clearly there is a segment of the market that wants this.

    For a list of available homes at Junction House, including floor plans and pricing, click here.