This week the team submitted a rezoning application for the southwest corner of Yonge & St. Clair (1 St. Clair Avenue West).

More of the details can be found over here on Urban Toronto, but so far the response has been overwhelmingly positive. People seem to appreciate the architecture, the public realm improvements, as well as how we're proposing to deal with the embodied carbon in the existing building.

The application proposes to retain the existing 12-storey office building and both expand its floorplates to the west and build new residential on top. In the middle is a shared multi-storey amenity space that also performs some pretty cool structural gymnastics courtesy of Stephenson Engineering (see above rendering).

This approach created some interesting design challenges for the team. Typically when you're adding onto an existing building, you want to do something new and not try and copy/bastardize what's already there. Oftentimes this means something more contemporary.

The architecture team at Gensler Toronto tried this approach but the podium proportions didn't feel quite right when we did it. So a decision was made to instead pay homage to the existing building's architecture, and then kind of reinterpret it by playing with scale and other details.

This way the original building remains architecturally legible, but the entire podium still reads as one and its proportions feel much better. We hope you like it as much as we do.

Candace Taylor published an article today in the WSJ about the late Zaha Hadid's One Thousand Museum tower in downtown Miami. The title: "Zaha Hadid’s Miami Tower Is an Architectural Feat. Is It Designed to Sell?"

It's an interesting case study, particularly for those of us in the industry. With only 84 units across 62 storeys, it is certainly "ultraluxury." There's also a helipad on the roof. Here is an excerpt from the article to give you a sense of the unit sizes:

Louis Birdman, one of the project’s developers, said prices, which range from just under $5 million to $25 million, are negotiable. Each floor has only one or two units, ranging in size from about 4,600 square feet to 10,400 square feet and each has at least four bedrooms. “Given what’s going on in the market now, I think all of us developers are competing for a similar buyer, so there’s obviously flexibility on price,” he said.

As you can probably glean from the above, the ultraluxury market has softened in Miami. But Candace is right: One Thousand Museum is an architectural masterpiece. If you're in the market for a new four bedroom home in downtown Miami, now may be right time.

Liz Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro was recently asked by designboom about how her firm approached the design of Fifteen Hudson Yards (the first residential tower in New York’s Hudson Yards).

The firm had never designed a high-rise before. So while their typical approach would be to analyze program, here they were heavily informed by the views – both in and out from the site – as you move up the tower.

The 88 storey tower transitions between two footprints. The base matches the street grid of the city, but as you move up the tower it transforms into a cloverleaf – allowing panoramic views of the city.

It is a somewhat similar approach to what has been proposed by Studio Gang for One Delisle. Except for the transformation here is to a multifaceted cylindrical shape (a hexadecagon is what has been drawn).

From the late 19th century when Chicago began to pioneer the modern skyscraper, architects and engineers have been thinking about how you treat a tall building as you move from top to bottom.

Chicago architect Louis Sullivan responded to this challenge with his tripartite approach to design. He believed that tall buildings should be characterized by three main divisions: a base (bottom), a shaft (middle), and a cap (top).

The technological innovation that allowed this thinking to flourish was the non-load-bearing curtain wall. Once the exterior walls of a tower no longer supported the actual building, architects then had the freedom to really experiment.

This remains true to this day, but we no longer need to confine ourselves to only three parts. New technologies now allow for more.

Today we have parametric modeling and other design tools that allow us to create new geometries and transitions; forms that would have been pretty complex to draw up in the past. 

In the case of Fifteen Hudson Yards, every floor plate from 20 something and up is slightly different. I wonder what Louis would think of this.

Image: Timothy Schenck via designboom