It is very common for jurisdictions to mandate the use of a licensed architect when building homes and buildings above a certain size. This is true in Ontario, and it's true in places like France, though the thresholds can vary widely and change over time. Currently, the threshold is 150 m2 in France. Okay, so what? Well, it turns out this simple rule has second-order consequences, as they often do.
Here's a fascinating research paper by Antoine Levy titled Regulating Housing Quality: Evidence from France. One of the things he looks at is the distribution of floor area in new housing units over time, from before there was an architect requirement threshold (ART), to the moments where this threshold was gradually lowered:
Prior to there being a threshold (1976), the chart shows a positive skew, but with a clustering of homes somewhere around 100 m2. Importantly, the distribution shows a smooth progression. But once an ART is implemented, the distribution then starts to show a clear spike right before the threshold, followed by a cliff and a "missing mass."
This, of course, makes sense. The market is pushing up against the glass to avoid having to use and pay for an architect. And the "missing mass" is the market shifting supply to below the threshold, or sufficiently beyond it. I mean, if you're going to surpass the threshold, you may as well do it confidently.
Now here's where things start to get more interesting. Levy finds that this threshold acts as a focal point that segments the market. Households above the threshold tend to have higher incomes, and homes just past the limit were on average 8-10% more expensive to build. This additional cost cannot be justified by the addition of the architect's fee alone.
On the other side of the threshold, the concentration of demand "up against the glass" was shown to create economies of scale through more standardized home design and production. In other words, the threshold incentivizes the market to get really good at designing and building a certain scale of home.
It was also shown to unintentionally promote greater housing density, because what the threshold does is create a soft cap on housing consumption for a large segment of the market. As you can see in the bottom right chart above, it effectively pulls supply back and under the threshold, away from larger homes and larger lots.
It may seem fairly innocuous to mandate that people use an architect above a certain scale, and I will forever be a proponent of great design, but as Thomas Sowell once said, "there are no solutions, only trade-offs."
Cover photo by Alex Tyson on Unsplash
One of my developer friends — who I would say has similar design tastes to my own — once said to me, "If I like it [the design], I often assume that the general public won't." What he was getting at is that architects and designers often appreciate buildings and spaces for different reasons.
For us (if I can say this without the OAA sending me another legal letter), it is often about things like the intellectual rigour behind the work, the "honesty" of the materials, and the greater social and historic context, rather than just "this has nice curb appeal."
So with that, I'm now going to go out on a limb and suggest that these converted industrial towers in former East Berlin fall into the category of "probably not for everyone." Built in the 1950s by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to process graphite, and later abandoned after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the property was eventually privatized in the 1990s to raise money for the state.
Then, between 2018 and 2021, architecture practice b+ — which has made a name for itself transforming old Brutalist buildings into super cool live-work spaces — reworked the interiors to create a workshop for itself.
The two industrial towers are 37.2 and 42.6 metres tall. And since their volumes reminded architect Arno Brandlhuber of the towers of San Gimignano, that became the project's name. The site area is 960 sqm, the usable floor area is around 300 sqm, and the entire property is for sale for €1,700,000. There's also future development potential!
I personally love the project. If Globizen were to have an office in Berlin, I'd want it to be here. But hey, what do you think?
Photos by Future Documentation
A few weeks ago, we spoke about the dramatic change that Toronto's East Bayfront has undergone over the last two decades. It's now a place. I also shared a time-lapse video from Waterfront Toronto showing how the Parliament Slip was landfilled in order to improve the street network in this area. If you missed it (and you like to nerd out on construction), it's worth watching.
In addition to this, Waterfront Toronto has (just?) released this interactive website showing in more detail what's planned for the Quayside area. And if you make it all the way to the end of the experience, you'll land on the below image, which shows some towers and the site earmarked for a school and potential cultural destination.
Clicking on the site leads to this pop-up:
Schools are obviously critical. Education is the number one predictor of household wealth. Build it. But I also think it's important that we take advantage of this opportunity to build a truly remarkable cultural destination on Toronto's doorstep. This is an opportunity for a globally recognized symbol that elevates the city's brand, drives tourism, and serves as an economic development catalyst.
So I would like to encourage those in charge to take this seriously. (If Globizen can help in any way, give us a call.) The right way to do it would be to host an international design competition and put the challenge to the world's best architects. This is not the time or place to be timid. Rather, it's the time and place to beat our chests. This could be a Sydney Opera House or Bilbao moment.
Actually, it could be something even greater: The Toronto Effect.
Cover photo by Antonio Gabola on Unsplash