The Urban Land Institute Toronto is hosting an event and panel discussion on April 8, 2021 about the future of high-rises in our cities. Here's the blurb:

Against the backdrop of the pandemic and its toll, what is the future of high-rises in our cities? What role do tall towers now play in shaping Toronto’s identity? While the pandemic has accelerated existing large trends, residential tall towers are proving the durability of a quality urban centre and hyper-urban lifestyles in Toronto and around the world.

An introduction will be provided by James Parakh (author, Fellow of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, and Urban Design Manager for the Toronto & East York District) and then a discussion will be moderated by Robyn Player (Director, BTY).

The discussion will be focused on what ULI is calling three of Toronto's most exciting tower projects under development: Pinnacle One Yonge, One Delisle, and 11 Yorkville.

I will be on the panel (talking One Delisle) alongside Lee Koutsaris (VP, Sales and Marketing, Metropia) and Anson Kwok (VP, Sales and Marketing, Pinnacle International).

If you'd like to register, you can do that over here. It should be a great/timely conversation.

I am a big fan of lights on buildings. Here is a photo of the Massey Tower (by MOD Developments and Hariri Pontarini Architects) that I quickly took on my walk home from the office this evening:

It's not a very good photo and it's not doing the project justice. So here's another shot of the mechanical penthouse lighting from their Instagram.

I've been noticing this lighting for a while now, and every time I see it I think to myself, "That's really well done." It's simple, elegant, and it reinforces the overall architectural intent of the building.

We are entering that time of the year, at least here in Toronto, where most of us will leave work and it will already be dark out. So the lighting on our buildings and in our public spaces can serve a particularly important function.

Lighting can, of course, be done poorly. And we do need to be mindful of migratory birds during the spring and fall. Artificial light disorients them at night.

But we all know how important lighting is to our interior spaces. The same is true for our urban spaces.

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