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:
