Last night as I was walking home, I came across the recently completed Yonge + Rich condominiums at Richmond and Victoria (I think they won awards for this name back in the day). I stopped to look up because I was curious about one particular detail -- the elbows.

This tower is, in effect, two towers that are attached in middle. And the differing facade treatments are meant to reinforce this: two towers, not one.

But because they are in fact connected, there are some unavoidable 90 degree angles in the floor plates. These spaces can be extremely tricky when it comes to laying out residential suites because they skew your ratio of square footage to vision glass. Usually you get too much of the former relative to the latter. You can also get awkward facing / privacy conditions.

And so these spaces are often referred to in the industry as the "elbow" suites or sometimes the "armpit" suites. Though I think elbows are a lot nicer than armpits.

Here's the Yonge + Rich example to illustrate what I'm talking about:

In this case, the entire stack is comprised of frosted translucent glass. So it is pretty clear that these spaces are not residential suites. Here's the floor plate:

What was done here was to make it circulation/corridor space. This solves the elbow suite problem and adds a nice feature to each floor. These days, very few corridors have natural light. Vision glass is too precious of a commodity. You could argue that it should have been clear glass, but presumably frosted glass was used to avoid privacy concerns.

The other trade-off that needs to be considered is that of efficiency. What is the ratio of saleable/rentable area to gross construction area? Adding circulation space lowers this number. So it can come down to whether it is better to have a higher efficiency with some elbows, or a lower efficiency with no elbows.

Every building is a prototype, isn't it?

This is an interesting infill housing project in Villa Allende, Argentina. Designed by Studio LZ, the community contains seven homes, built across a 600 square meter site. Each L-shaped home is 63 square meters and hugs a private courtyard space (many of which have an outdoor BBQ). On the main floor of each home are the kitchen and living areas. And on the second floor are two bedrooms, as well as a second bathroom.

It's a simple but clever design. Looking at a plan of the project, you can see that, despite its compactness, the L-shaped houses have been arranged in such a way that there are no direct facing conditions. The courtyards and window exposures alternate. It's almost as if they are Tetris pieces that have been pulled apart. The result is a dense community that still manages to offer some of the benefits of low-rise housing.

Photos by Gonzalo Viramonte

Last night as I was walking home, I came across the recently completed Yonge + Rich condominiums at Richmond and Victoria (I think they won awards for this name back in the day). I stopped to look up because I was curious about one particular detail -- the elbows.

This tower is, in effect, two towers that are attached in middle. And the differing facade treatments are meant to reinforce this: two towers, not one.

But because they are in fact connected, there are some unavoidable 90 degree angles in the floor plates. These spaces can be extremely tricky when it comes to laying out residential suites because they skew your ratio of square footage to vision glass. Usually you get too much of the former relative to the latter. You can also get awkward facing / privacy conditions.

And so these spaces are often referred to in the industry as the "elbow" suites or sometimes the "armpit" suites. Though I think elbows are a lot nicer than armpits.

Here's the Yonge + Rich example to illustrate what I'm talking about:

In this case, the entire stack is comprised of frosted translucent glass. So it is pretty clear that these spaces are not residential suites. Here's the floor plate:

What was done here was to make it circulation/corridor space. This solves the elbow suite problem and adds a nice feature to each floor. These days, very few corridors have natural light. Vision glass is too precious of a commodity. You could argue that it should have been clear glass, but presumably frosted glass was used to avoid privacy concerns.

The other trade-off that needs to be considered is that of efficiency. What is the ratio of saleable/rentable area to gross construction area? Adding circulation space lowers this number. So it can come down to whether it is better to have a higher efficiency with some elbows, or a lower efficiency with no elbows.

Every building is a prototype, isn't it?

This is an interesting infill housing project in Villa Allende, Argentina. Designed by Studio LZ, the community contains seven homes, built across a 600 square meter site. Each L-shaped home is 63 square meters and hugs a private courtyard space (many of which have an outdoor BBQ). On the main floor of each home are the kitchen and living areas. And on the second floor are two bedrooms, as well as a second bathroom.

It's a simple but clever design. Looking at a plan of the project, you can see that, despite its compactness, the L-shaped houses have been arranged in such a way that there are no direct facing conditions. The courtyards and window exposures alternate. It's almost as if they are Tetris pieces that have been pulled apart. The result is a dense community that still manages to offer some of the benefits of low-rise housing.

Photos by Gonzalo Viramonte