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.
I started watching Parasite on a flight home this past weekend (I know, I’m behind). The first couple of scenes immediately hooked me and so I ended up watching the full movie over the weekend. It’s one of the most creative movies I have seen in a long time. (To be fair, I don’t watch a lot of movies these days.) I won’t spoil it all for you here, but if you haven’t seen it yet, I would highly recommend it. One of the principal themes is social inequality. And it’s interesting to see how that gets told through the spaces within the film. The poor family lives in a “semi-basement” at the end of what appears to be a laneway. And the rich family lives, higher up, in a house designed by a famous architect. Naturally it has a big and perfectly manicured backyard. At one point in the film, you also get to see which housing type is more environmentally resilient.
I’ll leave it there. But it’s worth checking out if you are into award-winning Korean tragicomedies.
Picking a name for someone or something can be a daunting task. I have never had to name a newborn baby (though I’ve witnessed lots of people go through that process). But I am often involved in the naming of new buildings. Sometimes that process involves sitting in a room with a list of possible names in front of you, and having to decide which one is optimal. I don’t love this approach. Nowadays, I find it’s better to have the name naturally emerge early on in the development process, well before there’s an actual brand and identity for the project. You want it to accurately embody the vision for the project, the site’s history and context, and you want to know that it has some durability over time. Or at least, that’s the goal.
On a related note, the New Yorker recently published an interesting piece on why your name matters. In the middle of the 20th century, research suggested that our chosen names were hugely impactful to life outcomes, and that more typical names were better than unusual ones. The theory was something known as the implicit-egotism effect, which basically states that we like things, including names, that most resemble ourselves. We want familiar. Which to me, immediately suggests that this effect must depend on cultural context. What is considered “typical” obviously changes depending on where you are in the world.
Our thinking has advanced since then. More recently we have found that it’s not the name itself that creates the better life outcomes. Because if you control for a child’s background and upbringing, any sort of name effect seems to disappear. However, names do in fact signal who we are. They imply certain things. Many of us have heard about the studies that use resumes with different names to test how people respond. Names just aren’t inherently deterministic. You probably aren’t more likely to become a doctor simply because of your name.
Although, I’m not sure that takes much of the pressure off of picking the right one.
Today’s post is going to be a bit of a departure from our regularly scheduled programming. But it’s so cool that I had to share it. It’s a company called Vollebak, and they use science and technology to make highly technical clothing (or, as they call it, the future of clothing). It was founded by two brothers.
Every month they launch a new clothing concept. (Sign up here if you want to get on their list.) But each new piece they develop could take anywhere from one to five years to actually produce. Usually we’re talking about new production methods and materials that have never before been used for clothing.
But the piece I’m really eyeing is this blue morpho ski/snowboard jacket. It uses two billion microscopic glass spheres to try and replicate the wings of a blue morpho butterfly. During the day the jacket is matt blue. But as soon as you shine light onto it, it looks like the above photo.
This would be useful if you were, say, caught in an avalanche and a helicopter searchlight was trying to find you. Hopefully that’s a use case that none of us have to experience. But it could also be invaluable if you were out walking or cycling at night and you wanted to make sure that cars could see you.
(Please note how I somehow managed to make this post mildly relevant to cities.)
I love this article in Designlines Magazine about how Lawrence Blairs (owner of Atomic Design) has setup his 65 square meter one bedroom condo to serve as both a place to live and an art gallery.
The main living area is equipped with white vinyl screens that pull down to conceal the kitchen and other private areas, and make it feel like a white-walled gallery space. There’s naturally also a projector on the ceiling.
Supposedly it takes him about 30 minutes to prepare the space before an event. Here is a photo by Arash Moallemi via Designlines:
You don’t necessarily need a lot of space to do the things that you may want to do. You just need to be creative. Do you think that developers should offer more creative space solutions as part of their standard offering?
Witold Rybczynski’s recent blog post about architecture’s “curious business model” gets at one of the core challenges of new construction: “Every project is, in effect, a custom job; there are no real economies of scale.” There are also no reoccurring cash flows for the architect, Witold explains, unlike a writer who might earn ongoing royalties or a business owner whose wealth will grow as the business grows.
There are two items to discuss here: (1) The “curious business model” used in the practice of architecture and (2) the inefficiencies of construction.
The first one is not unique to architecture. You could say the same thing about the planning and real estate lawyers who also work on new buildings. But I take Witold’s point in that even a painter’s work could appreciate in value after it’s done, whereas there’s typically no mechanism for any of this to accrue (to the architect) in the world of architecture.
When I was young, I was told that there are two ways to make money. You can either trade your time for money or you can own assets that make you money. An example of the latter might be a farm where the tenant farmer pays you rent every month. You’re not trading your time by actually doing the farming, you just own the asset.
This may seem obvious, but it’s fundamental. And it’s one of the reasons why, when I was in architecture school, I admired the practices of people like Jonathan Segal out of San Diego. Jonathan is one of the pioneers of the “architect as developer” approach. He simply became his own client and started building his own projects.
Moving on to topic number two.
Everyone in the business of building new buildings is looking for repeatable methodologies. Many have thought: How do we make the construction of buildings more like the assembly of cars? How do we create a standardized kit of parts? And that has lead to longstanding efforts around prefabrication. Today, as you know, we are also looking at how 3D printing might make this easier/cheaper.
In some ways, that is happening. There are examples of prefabrication and panelization, and there are developers who are using this approach. (See H+ME Technology.) But for the most part, we still build on site and it’s still a messy process with lots of waste and inefficiencies. If there was a cheaper and more effective way to do it, the industry would certainly move in that direction. Eventually that will happen.
In the meantime, we will continue building our prototypes.
Few things go as well together as tacos and snowstorms. And so that’s exactly what I did for lunch today given the awesome — I love snow — storm that we’re having in Toronto this weekend. The garnish you’re seeing below is grilled cactus. Dave, the owner of Playa Cabana Taqueria, grows it on location and uses it for special dishes like this one here. If you haven’t been, I would highly recommend it. They’re located at 21 St. Clair Avenue East.
In addition to tacos, I also spent the morning with Gabriel Fain Architects working on our upcoming laneway suite collaboration. Some of you may remember that our previous laneway project was refused at the Committee of Adjustment back in 2017. Well now that laneway suites are permissible as-of-right, it’s time to get going. We are not planning to seek any variances from what is currently allowed.
But if you’re thinking about building your own laneway suite, there are still a number of issues that you might run into depending on your property. Servicing, proximity to a fire hydrant, access, and trees are maybe some of the most common. I know that the city is working to resolve / streamline some of these complications, as the objective is truly to build laneway suites across the city.
As Gabriel and I work through our project this year, my plan is to write about it here on the blog. And hopefully when the project is complete, the posts will serve as a kind of guide for homeowners. These suites are really setup to be built by individual homeowners, as opposed to by developers. If you don’t already email subscribe to this blog and are interested in learning more, sign up here.
In the meantime, if you have any questions about laneway suites, there are a number of experts in the city, including Gabriel Fain Architects and the folks over at Lanescape.
Last week was CES in Las Vegas. Some or many of you were probably there. One of the things that was announced at the show was a project by Bjarke Ingels Group for Toyota called the Woven City. Situated at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan, the development sits on a 70 hectare site and will eventually house some 2,000 people.
The objective is for it to act as a living laboratory for a number of new city building initiatives, ranging from autonomy and mobility as a service to multi-generational living and hydrogen-powered infrastructure. Woven City is intended to house not only residents, but also researchers who can test out and learn from these new ideas.
Below is a short video from Dezeen. It’s entirely visual. No words. There’s also an official website, but not much is up there yet. Hopefully there will be more soon. Construction is set to start next year (2021) and it’ll be BIG’s first project in Japan.
I was recently having a debate with one of our architecture partners about the interrelationship between architecture, interiors, and branding. This came up because, in New York City, you almost need a name brand architect attached to your project in order to sell luxury condos.
But this raises an interesting set of questions: How much value is driven by the quality of the architecture versus the architect’s brand? (Though, presumably you need the former in order to build the latter.) And how much of the value is actually just driven by the finishes (interiors) and the branding that you layer on after?
This latter scenario is a depressing thought for architects. It is architecture as a kind of “empty vessel.” One that just gets dressed up for today’s Instagrammable moments. And I am sure that you can think of some examples of this. Not everything can be capital A architecture.
But what is clear is that the most successful design-driven projects don’t think in this way. They are thoughtful and deliberate about each component, and they all work together to strengthen each other. Marketing, after all, is about telling the right story. It is always helpful when you actually have one to tell.
This is a terrific infill project by Bureau de Change (architect) for HGG London (developer). It’s a five-storey mixed-use development in London’s Fitzrovia neighborhood.
The design ambition was to respect the area’s history, materiality, and proportions, but also create something entirely new. The result is a blue clay (brick) facade that transforms and looks like this:
And it was done by inventing a collection of misshapen blocks — 44 of them to be exact. Over 5,000 blocks were ultimately used for the facade and it was assembled on site using a 1:1 printed template. Each block came with a set of instructions.
There’s something nice about working at this scale and being able to get into this level of detail. It’s 21st century craftsmanship (the entire facade was modeled in 3D before it was built).
Tesla’s new Cybertruck was the talk of the town last week. Its design is polarizing and both windows broke during the unveiling (Elon’s reaction was amazing). At first I couldn’t tell if this wasn’t some sort of spoof on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator. Everything seemed to fit, including the design of the car, the chosen brand typography, and Elon’s outfit.
But within the first 24 hours and with no paid advertising, Tesla received 146,000 pre-orders for the truck (though, all it takes is a USD 150 fully refundable deposit to secure a place in line). So while a lot of you may consider this to be one the ugliest vehicles around, there are others who think this entire move is genius.
The design was jarring when I first saw it. It looked like a comical representation of what we thought vehicles in the future were going to look like. But I have to admit that the design is growing on me. And I agree that for Tesla to win any sort of marketshare in the pick-up category, it needed to do something radical. Brand loyalty to Ford’s F-Series pick up truck is simply too strong.
Marques Brownlee has a good video explaining this take (and why he ordered a Tesla Cybertruck):
But if successful, I also wonder to what extent the Tesla Cybertruck will eat into the sales of existing pick-up truck models versus capture new buyers that historically wouldn’t have bought this kind of vehicle. In other words, we are seeing tech people and successful YouTubers, like Marques, pre-order this truck. But I bet that very few of them currently drive an F-150.
