I was “on site” this morning for the installation of the helical piers for my laneway suite (that will be the topic of a separate post). More often than not, I’m in the office. But I like going on site because, well, building things is fun. One of the things that I find interesting about being on site, though, is that my preferred method of communication always seems to change. When I’m in the office, I have a bias toward emails. That is the case for two reasons: 1) I’m usually focusing on something and I find that calls can be disruptive, and 2) emails can be a highly efficient way to communicate. Tell me what you need (in the shortest email possible) and I’ll try and respond as succinctly as I can. However, when I’m on site, all of a sudden I don’t want to do emails. I would rather talk on the phone. That becomes the most direct way to deal with things. I am mentioning this because communication is paramount. And many of us have different preferences for how we like to do it. Knowing those preferences can be helpful when you’re trying to get things done.
Category: Uncategorized
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Project Profile: Gusto 501 by PARTISANS
I finally visited Gusto 501 over the weekend. The place is amazing — both the food and the architecture. And I don’t know about you, but the food always seems to taste better when you’re surrounded by great design. If you haven’t yet been, I would strongly encourage you to go. Designed by PARTISANS for restaurateur Janet Zuccarini, it’s a 6,700 square foot multi-level complex made for the consumption of Italian food and drink. Now, I could go on about its elaborate clay walls, its vast double height spaces, and its massive operable glass facade (supposedly it’s one of the biggest anywhere). But really the best thing to do here is just show you. So here you are. All photos by Nic Lehoux. Architecture by PARTISANS. (Don’t mind the snow. It’s actually lovely in Toronto right now.)
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Anxious urbanism
One of the first things that I noticed when I visited Rio de Janeiro a few years ago was the clear fixation on safety and security. There are gates and cameras everywhere. And the guidance you tend to receive from the locals usually resolves around how to stay safe. Don’t wander around at night. Be careful when you take out your phone. Be mindful of certain areas. You know, those sorts of things.
Of course, you never really know how dangerous a city is because it’s one of those things that’s impractical to test. You’re not going to wander around dark places just to see what the probability of being robbed is. The more sensible thing to do is simply believe what people are telling you and you observe the cues scattered around the built environment.
The result is a general sense of anxiety. You’re not quite sure if all the gates and cameras are truly necessary, but their mere presence makes you believe that they might be. I mean, why else would they be so pervasive? Or, could it be that people are overshooting with their investments in safety and security because, well, fear and paranoia are strong motivators?
I was reminded of all of this as I read through Ed Chartlon’s recent book review of, Panic City: Crime and Fear Industries in Johannesburg. The title of his review is Anxious Urbanisms, and I think that’s a good way of describing some of these phenomenons. It’s an urbanism of uncertainty. I haven’t read the book (yet), but it’s an interesting topic.
So I will leave you all with this excerpt from the review:
Ultimately, what we might take from Panic City, then, is less a comprehensive sociology of crime in the city and more a method of affective analysis. What the book provides is a sense of the ways in which the emotional sphere organises space, how feelings like anxiety or fear or panic, currently widely distributed across the world, materialise themselves, architecturally and politically. If immunity is anything like security, Murray offers us a cautionary tale. For wherever uncertainty thrives, so does the tendency towards paranoid thinking—which is to say, a contagion of a different sort, one that licences regimes of suspicion, self-protection and individual security, and all at the eventual cost of collective wellbeing and interdependence.
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The importance of the RCP
One of my colleagues likes to remind me that in an open concept floor plan, which is obviously pretty common these days, it is the RCP, or reflected ceiling plan, that really defines a space. (For those of you who might be unfamiliar, an RCP is a plan drawing that shows you what the ceiling of a space looks like.) What he means by this is that it is things like dropped ceilings and bulkheads that really define a space. And when you’re designing a multi-unit building, you are going to have these things to contend with and coordinate (though you can also run exposed ductwork, which eliminates the need for some bulkheads/drops).
I like this reminder for two reasons.
One, he’s right. Ceilings matter. Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, is well known for playing around with them in his projects. He would take you through compressed spaces with lower ceiling heights and then “release” you into grand open spaces. The contrast made it all feel even more dramatic. (But I reckon Mr. Wright was pretty short because I swear I’ve been in some of his houses and the ceilings were in the range of 6′-6″.) And two, I want us to focus on this level of detail in our projects. They can be a pain in the ass to coordinate and you can’t always get them exactly how you want them, but we are paying attention.
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Project Profile: LR2 Residence
Homes that are built on or into sloping terrains are fascinating to me because the inconveniences of having to deal with uneven ground create additional constraints. And constraints are good for design. Not only because, I feel, it makes the design process easier, but because it helps to ensure that the moves being made are less arbitrary.
You are forced to respond to the surrounding context. You have no choice but to find some kind of harmony. And that can make things feel more deliberate, which may be the most important characteristic of good design. You want to know that someone actually thought about the design that they have put forward. You want to know that things were carefully considered.
Of course, sloping terrains also create opportunities. They usually translate into great views, which is certainly the case with the LR2 Residence in Pasadena, California by Montalba Architects (pictured above). Here, the main “entertaining deck” is located on the upper floor and has a large outdoor terrace. This configuration is not uncommon in slopside houses.
For more information about the LR2 Residence, including photos and floor plans, click here.
Photo/Diagram: Kevin Scott / Montalba Architects
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Barton Myers’ California estate is on the market for $8.2 million
Architect Barton Myers has his home in Montecito, California on the market right now for $8.2 million. In addition to his own residence, the 38-acre site also houses his studio and a guesthouse, all of which have roll-up garage doors so that you can enjoy that perfectly benign California climate. The estate is quintessentially Myers and it’s obviously awesome. Here is the listing from Sothebys. (I tried to street view the address but was only successful at locating what I think is its mailbox. What a natural setting.)
For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the work of Myers, he is considered one of Toronto’s most influential architects. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and working with architect Louis Kahn for a few years, he moved to Toronto in the late 1960s to take up a teaching position at the University of Toronto. He then started his own architecture practice with Jack Diamond (also an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania) and remained a principal of Diamond and Myers until 1975.
Myers moved on to start his own firm — Barton Myers Associates — that same year and became known for notable projects such as 19 Berryman Street in Yorkville (Myers’ own residence) and the Wolf House at 51 Roxborough Drive, which was Architectural Record’s House of the Year in 1977. Probably the most distinguishing characteristic of his work is his use of exposed industrial materials, which is, of course, something that is on display in Montecito. But he managed to deploy these materials in a way that made them feel high-brow. His homes also feel very California to me.
In 1984, he opened up an office in Los Angeles and eventually his practice in Toronto was shutdown. But not before leaving a lasting legacy in Toronto. For a map of all the firm’s North American projects, click here.
Photo: BMA
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The dazzling Mira tower
I have said this before on the blog, but one of my favorite tall buildings is the Mira tower in San Francisco by Tishman Speyer (developer) and Studio Gang (architect). Now that it’s pretty much complete and residents have started to move in, John King, urban design critic for the SF Chronicle, has published this review of the building. It’s behind a paywall, but you should be able to at least see all of the photos, and below is an introductory excerpt.
Even with today’s grim need for social isolation, San Francisco’s most eye-catching residential tower wants to pull you close.
From the Bay Bridge or the Embarcadero, the 39-story Mira at the corner of Folsom and Spear streets is a flowing stack of tightly wound white metal bays, frozen in motion. Fragmentary glimpses from nearby blocks defy expectations, whipsawed slivers amid the stodgy norm.
Finally, there’s the view straight up from the sidewalk — a crisp commotion of stacked angles, precisely arranged but seemingly ready to fly out in a dozen directions at once.
Though Mira has been in the works since 2014, the architectural show still feels fresh as the first residents begin to unpack. But this 392-unit residential complex was also conceived as a celebration of triumphant urbanism — a far cry from the mood of this troubled summer.
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What would you like to know about real estate development? (Also, inclusionary zoning)
I asked this question on Twitter this morning because I am planning to write more development-related posts. It’s a topic that seems to be of interest to a lot of people. One question that I received was about the kind of profit margins that Toronto developers have been making over the past few decades. More specifically: How much have they increased? My response was that they haven’t increased. In fact, if anything, they’ve been compressing as a result of rising/additional costs. (I’ve touched on this before in posts like this one about cost-plus pricing.) I think a lot of developers are actually wondering how much elasticity is left in the market to continue absorbing these cost increases.
Follow-up question to my response: Why then does this report by Steve Pomeroy claim that developers could still make a 15% margin even if they earmarked 30-40% of their units as affordable? Well, this was news to me so I went through the report and committed to responding on this blog. To be more precise, the report finds that there’s room in as-of-right developments to dedicate 10% affordable in medium-cost areas and 25% affordable in high-cost areas. For rezoned sites, the numbers are 30% affordable in high-cost areas and 15% affordable in medium-cost areas. These are a potentially dangerous set of takeaways for a few reasons.
Very little mid-rise and high-rise development happens as-of-right in the City of Toronto. I don’t know what the exact percentage is, but I suspect it’s low. It would be very difficult to buy land if you were valuing it on this basis. And when you are valuing it — that is, running a development pro forma — it’s not enough to pull averages from a cost guide and run high-level numbers. You can start there, but ultimately you’re going to have to get more granular. Are you factoring the hundreds of thousands of dollars (more for bigger projects) that the City will charge you to occupy any public right-of-ways? What about your public contribution monies? This has historically been hard to estimate because the math that is used is akin to a secret recipe.
In this particular report, they assume a 100-unit building with 88,750 square feet of gross floor area. Since GFA typically factors some allowable deductions, the gross construction area for the project is going to be greater. Let’s assume it’s 5% more — so about 93,190 square feet. This is how your construction manager will think about and do take-offs for the project. In the report, they peg total construction costs at $23,208,480. That works out to just shy of $250 per square foot (costs divided by above grade GCA). You cannot build a reinforced concrete residential building with below-grade parking for this number in Toronto. In today’s market, and at this small of a scale, you might be looking at $350 to 400 psf.
On the low end of this range, that would mean your costs have just gone up by $9.4 million — which just so happens to be the expected developer/builder profit in this model. Except now you’re underwater and you won’t be able to finance and build your project. It’s probably time to look at your revenues and see if you can increase your projected rents at all. This is what I was getting at with cost-plus pricing. I would also add that I/we typically shy away from projects of this scale. There isn’t a lot of margin for error. One or two surprises and you might be cooked. So with or without inclusionary zoning, these can be challenging projects that many developers won’t even look at.
My point with all of this is twofold: development pro formas are delicate and margins aren’t as generous and locked-in as most people seem to think. More often than not we end up passing on sites because we simply can’t make the numbers work. The land is just too expensive. Development happens on the margin. So talking about developers “absorbing” the costs of inclusionary zoning is perhaps the wrong way to frame this discussion. A more appropriate set of questions might be: Who is going to pay for the cost of inclusionary zoning? Are landowners going to suddenly drop their prices? Is the City going to reduce their development charges/impact fees? Or will developers wait until market prices and rents increase so that they can cover these new costs? This latter scenario is how it has worked so far.
If you have other questions about development that you would like me to take a stab at answering, please leave a comment below or tweet at me.
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The many forces shaping our cities
Richard Florida has a three-part essay over on Bloomberg CityLab about the forces that are currently shaping American cities. In part three, he argues that this pandemic will likely accelerate many of the trends that were already underway — families will continue to like the suburbs and young people and businesses will continue to cluster in dominant global cities. At the same time, he argues that we will see a kind of “urban reset.” A window of opportunity where we just might be able to rebuild our cities to be more affordable, more inclusive, and more productive. Could this be the moment where we commit to transforming our suburbs into more walkable mixed-use communities? Could this crisis actually strengthen our cities, as I have argued before on the blog? At this point in time, the only thing I really know for sure is that most of our predictions will be wrong.
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The problem of Erie Terrace (and why Craven Road has one really long fence)
On the east side of Toronto is a north-south street called Craven Road. It runs from Queen Street in the south to Danforth Avenue in the north. It’s an odd street in that there are only homes on one side of it — the east side. The west side is fenced off. No garages. No laneway suites. Just one long fence separating Craven Road from the backyards belonging to the homes on neighboring Ashdale Avenue. Given that Craven Road is a real city street with things like services and a name, you might be wondering, as I did, why this condition exits. Surely the people on Ashdale Avenue would be better off if they took proper advantage of their “through lots.”
What gives?
Turns out there is a reason for this and it dates back to the beginning of the 20th century. Before 1923, Craven Road was actually called Erie Terrace. It began its life as a smaller laneway outside of the city and was initially home to a “shacktown.” The street was a kind of linear slum, housing new immigrants and providing a place for people to cheaply throw up whatever they could afford to build.
For a variety of reasons, Erie Terrace eventually became a problem and the City decided that it would be best to widen the street from its varying 18 foot width to the then standard 33 feet. The widening work was authorized in 1911. But as is always the case, there were a few problems. Who would pay for it? The City would pay for a bit of it, but the expectation was that the residents along Erie Terrace would also chip in. And since Erie Terrace was technically a one-sided street, they were in effect being asked to pay double what was typical at the time. Usually the burden would get split across both sides of the street.
There was also a socioeconomic question. The residents on Ashdale Avenue were thought to be wealthier than those on Erie Terrace and so they supposedly wanted the squalor out of their backyards. The City also had concerns that residents along Ashdale would use this double frontage to do wild and crazy things, such as build garages, sheds, and backyard cottages. Clearly there would be no room for such oddities after the widening.
I’m not sure which problem proved to be the thorniest, but ultimately a solution was found. Erie Terrace would be widened, but the City would retain a small sliver of land on the west side of it and erect a wooden fence in perpetuity. This would keep both groups separate and ensure that the folks on Ashdale — who had contributed some of their land, but not any money — didn’t get use of the road. And it has remained this way for over a century.
If you ask me, it seems silly to keep this fence up. This is an ideal street to infill with laneway suites and other missing middle-type housing. But I’m sure I’m not the first person to stumble upon this east end anachronism. For a more detailed history lesson on the Craven Road fence, click here.