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: Design

  • Elevators in North America are broken

    It was not my intention to make this building code week on the blog, but for some reason that has happened. So let’s continue. Here is an interesting guest essay — about elevators — written by Stephen Smith for the New York Times.

    Stephen is the founder and executive director of a Brooklyn-based non-profit called the Center for Building in North America. And what they do is conduct research on building codes, specifically in the United States and Canada, and then advocate for reforms.

    Here’s what he thinks about elevators (taken from the above essay):

    Elevators in North America have become over-engineered, bespoke, handcrafted and expensive pieces of equipment that are unaffordable in all the places where they are most needed. Special interests here have run wild with an outdated, inefficient, overregulated system. Accessibility rules miss the forest for the trees. Our broken immigration system cannot supply the labor that the construction industry desperately needs. Regulators distrust global best practices and our construction rules are so heavily oriented toward single-family housing that we’ve forgotten the basics of how a city should work.

    Here’s how the US compares to a few European countries:

    Nobody is marveling at American elevators anymore. With around one million of them, the United States is tied for total installed devices with Italy and Spain. (Spain has one-seventh our population, 6 percent of our gross domestic product and fewer than half as many apartments.) Switzerland and New York City have roughly the same population, but the lower-rise alpine country has three times as many single-family houses as Gotham — and twice as many passenger elevators.

    And here’s a set of cost comparisons:

    Behind the dearth of elevators in the country that birthed the skyscraper are eye-watering costs. A basic four-stop elevator costs about $158,000 in New York City, compared with about $36,000 in Switzerland. A six-stop model will set you back more than three times as much in Pennsylvania as in Belgium. Maintenance, repairs and inspections all cost more in America, too.

    If you’re interested in this topic, I would encourage you to give the full article a read. It’s highly relevant to our ongoing discussions around missing middle housing. If cities, like Toronto, hope to build a lot more apartment buildings (especially smaller-scale ones), they are going to need affordable and plentiful elevator options.

    (Thanks to Michael Visser for sharing this article me.)

  • Art in hospitals

    Art in hospitals is such a good idea. The above photos are from Michael Garron Hospital, here in Toronto. One thing I have never understood is why so many hospitals look and feel depressing. (My mom is a nurse and so I was around them growing up.)

    I fully appreciate that utility is first and foremost and that construction budgets are always tight. But it strikes me that if there’s one place where you want the opposite of depressing, it is in the places where people go when they’re already not well.

    It also doesn’t necessarily need to cost more to be “not depressing.” A little creativity and caring goes a long way.

    I don’t know, maybe this is so often the case because the people making the important decisions don’t believe that our environments affect our well being. So the design process naturally reduces to just getting the utilitarian parts right and not spending a penny beyond that.

    Whatever the case, I do believe that our environments affect us. More than most of us probably appreciate. And so naturally, I think that art in hospitals is a very good thing.

  • 3% approach

    The late fashion designer, Virgil Abloh, had a design rule for himself called the “3% approach.” Above is a slide from a presentation that he gave at Harvard back in 2013 where he listed it as item 3 of his “personal design language.” The idea behind this 3% rule is simple: you really only need to change something by 3% in order to create something new.

    Case in point:

    Given this, it should come as no surprise that Abloh had cited artist Marcel Duchamp as being a source of inspiration. (We’ve spoken about this before.) Duchamp is most famous for his “readymade” sculptures where he took existing objects — like urinals — and transformed them into art by signing them and curating them appropriately. This was obviously controversial, but it made Duchamp one of the most important artists of the 20th century.

    Now, 3% seems like an oddly precise number. I don’t know how, for instance, you quantify the amount of change on the above shoe. Is it surface area? In any event, that’s beside the point. What’s most fascinating for me about this approach is that it suggests that small changes are enough to, not just create novelty, but actually establish authorship. Meaning, the shoe on the right is no longer a Converse shoe. It is now an “OFF-WHITE” shoe. They authored it.

    Like the work of Duchamp, this was and is controversial. Lots of companies have sued Off-White for trademark infringement. We know, for example, where the above black stripes came from and we know that Off-White’s multi-directional arrow logo is borrowed from Glasgow Airport’s logo c.1960. But that’s clearly the point of readymade reworks. And it’s clearly enough for people to want to pay a lot more for the shoe on the right.

    Fascinating.

    Do you think that this 3% approach applies (or could apply) to other things outside of fashion, like architecture and buildings? I think so.

  • How Muji is collaborating with Japan’s housing agency

    This is a familiar story that is, of course, not unique to Japan:

    “Danchi”, or apartment blocks built by Japan’s housing agency during the country’s high-growth period, may look grim and outdated in today’s Tokyo, where flashy glass and steel towers reign.

    However, I only just learned that, since 2013, the Japanese houseware brand Muji has been renovating apartments within these housing blocks in an attempt to reduce vacancies:

    But danchi are becoming hip again, thanks to modern renovations by lifestyle brand Muji, which is turning the poky, multi-room flats into open-plan studios.

    The above excerpts are from a 2015 article, but this partnership between Muji and Japan’s Urban Renaissance (UR) Agency continues to this day. Today, they’re also focused on creating a greater sense of community within these danchi neighborhoods.

    It’s a logical collaboration. Both want to bring good and affordable design to the masses. And obviously there are brand benefits for Muji. It’s a way to expose more people to their products.

    But what I find particularly interesting is that it, once again, shows the potential of a strong brand within the real estate industry.

    According to the same 2015 article, as soon as Muji completed its first round of apartment renovations, UR saw 2x the number rental applications from people in their 20s and 30s. Perhaps the number is even higher today.

    Clearly what happened is that you had young followers of the brand who said to themselves, “oh if Muji is involved, it must then be cool and nice, and so I’d like to live there.”

    I mention this because, as a gross generalization, real estate companies don’t seem to focus on their own brands in the same way other companies do. (Again, I’m making a gross generalization.)

    Instead, they often rely on 3rd party brands — hotel brands, fashion brands, and whatever else — to augment as needed. (See “Dubai is now the capital of branded residences.”)

    Maybe this is truly the optimal way to do it. Just partner as needed. Or maybe more real estate companies should invest in their own brand.

    Photo by taro ohtani on Unsplash

  • I think Roman Mars would appreciate Utah’s new state flag

    Utah got a new state flag over the weekend that looks like this:

    And I immediately thought of this TED Talk by Roman Mars. For those of you who don’t know, Roman is the creator of 99% Invisible and a great lover of well-designed flags. His general rules of thumb are to keep things super simple and to use meaningful symbolism. And I’m fairly certain that he knows what he’s talking about because, in his talk, he refers to the Canadian flag as the gold standard for flags.

    In the case of Utah’s new flag, the symbols are this. The blue at the top is meant to represent Utah’s wide-open skies and lakes. The white in the middle represents its snowy mountains (of course). The red stripe is meant to represent Southern Utah’s red canyon landscape. The hexagon is meant to reference a honeycomb. And finally, the beehive is there because, well, Utah is the beehive state.

    Utah has long enjoyed this reference to beehives. Supposedly, it was early pioneers who started throwing around this reference because they believed it symbolized working together, perseverance, and overall industry. And that’s why the state’s official motto is, “Industry.” So I’d say that they used/kept the right meaningful symbolism.

    Though when I first saw the new flag, I immediately wondered whether the hexagon and honeycomb could have been made just a little simpler. Was the yellow fimbriation, for example, really needed within the blue hexagon? But the more I look at it, the more I like it and the more I think that Roman Mars would be happy with how this turned out. What are your thoughts?

  • The Allen key

    I’ve been assembling a lot of things over the past few weeks, and that got me wondering.

    IKEA did not invent the Allen key. Though today, it might feel that way. Canadian Peter L. Robertson first commercialized the square socket in 1908. And in 1909, American Willian G. Allen patented the hex varietal.

    Due to an increased interest in interchangeability, hex nuts and keys would go on to become the dominant mode of fastening after World World II. And in English-speaking countries, the name Allen has largely stuck.

    They’re cheap to make and you get built-in leverage with its longer arm.

    IKEA first began using hex keys in the 1960s. Their philosophy was: “You do your part. We do our part. Together we save money.” Meaning, you assemble the things yourself. Here’s a set of assembly instructions from 1968:

    Today, most of us probably take it for granted just how radical of an idea this was. IKEA had smartly figured out that flat packing furniture saved a ton of money for everyone. The challenge was that it then had to get everyone accustomed to putting together their own furniture.

    But they more than did that. They arguably ushered in a revolution in furniture. And they did it on the backbone of a simple, yet revolutionary, device that, over a century later, most of us still call an Allen key.

  • Live from the co-working space at Junction House

    Yesterday’s post was written in the co-working (/lobby) area of Junction House. I wrote about this space nearly a year ago when it was under construction, but now it’s complete and people like me are using it:

    I spent a few hours working in the space yesterday, and it was amazing to see residents and guests coming and going. Some people were waiting to meet someone. Some people were just playing on their phones. And others, like me, were jumping on and off calls and writing blog posts. Later in the evening, it transitioned to guests carrying bottles of wine and flowers.

    This was always the intent of this “amenity.” We wanted to create a social space for residents and guests, replicating a bit of the feeling that you might get in a hotel lobby bar. But ultimately, this is the kind of space that will almost certainly evolve over time, depending on how residents choose to use it. It’s not rigidly defined; it’s more of a flex space.

    It’s also worth mentioning that this space was designed well before COVID. A lot of people have asked us if this was in response to that, hoping to identify tangible ways in which design has responded to the pandemic. But honestly, we didn’t change anything. Gathering spaces were important before, and they remain important today.

    I guess in many ways this is a space that sits somewhere in between a “first place” and a “third place.” It’s almost a first place in that it’s in a building that people call home. But it’s also a more public social environment that isn’t technically home or work. So I’m really looking forward to seeing how it settles in and evolves over time.

    I’ll report back.

  • Solar power as art

    The past week has felt more like a London winter, than a Toronto one. It has been mild, rainy, and gray. So right now feels like an opportune time to write about this solar-powered light/art piece called Sunne. Created by Marjan van Aubel, the light has been designed to hang right in front of a window using two simple cables. There’s no need for an external power source, because it has an integrated battery that harvests sun during the day. The light then automatically turns on at sunset, and has the ability to simulate some pretty stunning sun experiences.

    Now, if you happen to live in a place with a roof that gets good sun exposure, I suppose you could just install a bunch of solar panels and use them to generate power for cool-looking things in your home. But if you don’t have the ability to do that — for instance, maybe you live in a multi-family building — then this feels like a clever and extremely beautiful way to harvest some amount of sun. I’m sure that, eventually, we’ll have building facades that can generate a meaningful amount of solar power, but until then, you’ve got devices like Sunne.

    P.S. For what it’s worth, I’ll take cold, snowy and sunny, over mild, rainy and gray, any day of the week.

    Image: Sunne

  • Pink glow

    Here’s a potentially hypothetical question.

    If you were in the market for a 3-bedroom penthouse, and its 1,100 sf wraparound terrace with skyline views just so happened to have an enormous neon-like sign above it, would you consider this to be a feature or a bug?

    The sign does turn off at 11PM, but before then, it creates this awesome/lovely pink glow on the terrace. My sense is that this will be fairly divisive. You’re either going to love it or you’re going to hate it. Which side are you on?

    Let me know in the comment section below.

  • Adaptive reuse in Hamilton, Ontario

    I was recently on Monocle Radio (The Urbanist) talking with Andrew Tuck about our Steelport project in Hamilton, Ontario. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Steelport is a new 800-acre industrial development on the city’s waterfront (almost the size of Central Park in Manhattan). Slate acquired the site in 2022 and, when fully built out, it is expected to create up to 23,000 new jobs and nearly $4 billion in economic activity for the Ontario economy. To have a listen to the interview, click here. It’s only about 8 minutes.

    Thanks for having me on the episode, Monocle. But more importantly, a shout-out to my colleague Steven Dejonckheere. He lives and breathes this project every day, and is the real mind behind it.