I spent this morning filming a new short video for Junction House. My friends Adriana and Mateusz live in a beautiful boutique condominium building downtown. They are also raising their young daughter there, and using it as an office and design studio (he’s an architect).… Read More
Salt Lake City is not a walking city. The blocks are too big (660 feet x 660 feet) and the streets are too wide (132 feet) for that. This has translated into many of the streets have upwards of 6 lanes. To put this into… Read More
What do you think of this beautiful low-rise apartment building? It is called Spadina Gardens and it was built (allegedly illegally) on Toronto’s Spadina Avenue in 1906, shortly before the City enacted an outright ban on “disease-breeding tenements” (i.e. apartment buildings) in all residential neighborhoods.… Read More
Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt of the 99% Invisible podcast have a recent book out that is all about cities. True to their radio show, it is about the often-overlooked design choices that have shaped and continue to shape our cities. Everything from why jersey… Read More
How often do you see it around town? Here in Toronto, I can’t say that I see ours all that often outside of city hall. Am I missing it? Here’s what it looks like: In other cities, such as Chicago, the city flag seems to… Read More
Roman Mars of 99% Invisible recently published an excellent episode called The Mind of an Architect. It has to do with a set of research studies completed in the late 1950s by an organization at the University of California, Berkeley known as the Institute of… Read More
I have never really gotten into podcasts. Sometimes I listen to The Urbanist on Monocle Radio when I’m puttering around my place, but generally speaking I don’t consume a lot of content in this format. Part of this might be because I don’t have a… Read More
Brutalism is an architectural movement that most people, other than architecture nerds, hate. Derived from the French words for raw concrete – béton brut – Brutalist architecture is characterized by its use of exposed concrete and its imposing fortress-like qualities. Most people find it too… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 