Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.
I’m so predictable. This is the kind of house that tends to grab my attention: modern design, relatively small footprint (~7.8m x 12.3m), narrow street (~4m), and panoramic views (of Seoul). But what does it take to actually build a house like this in an urban fabric as dense as Seoul’s?
If you read TIUM Architect’s description (using Google Translate for those of us who don’t speak Korean), you’ll see that the house was built out of concrete and steel, but that concrete trucks couldn’t stage on the narrow and dead-end street.
So what they ended up having to do was build a 100-meter concrete conveying pipe (~328 feet) and staging somewhere else. It was such a pain in the ass that they only wanted to do this for the foundations. The rest of the house was built out of steel. (I think because of the clear spans that they wanted.)
Sometimes small infill projects aren’t as simple as they may seem. In this case, the lot size is 92 m2. The building footprint is 51.53 m2 (56% lot coverage). And the total floor area is 136.52 m2.
On July 1 of this year, a new California bill, called the “Affordable Housing and High Road Jobs Act of 2022”, will go into effect. And the goal of this legislation is to significantly increase the supply of new homes in the state by allowing multi-family construction on lands that are currently zoned for commercial uses.
On some level, it is of course curious that there even needs to be this bill. Because what we are effectively saying is, “hey, we should allow people to build a mix of uses on our main streets and with high enough densities that we might actually be able to support transit.” Why was this not always the case? (Rhetorical question.)
In the words of architect and planner Peter Calthorpe, who was recently interviewed here in ArchDaily, this is a “landmark piece of legislation” that has “received very little attention.” So that’s why we’re talking about it today.
Calthorpe was actively involved in crafting this legislation, and his work apparently started with different scenario land-use models. The first experiment looked at a 43-mile stretch of El Camino running from San Francisco to San Jose (pictured below). And what they found was that this one strip alone could accommodate somewhere around 250,000 new infill homes.
To put this into context, the state of California is currently building about 140,000 new homes each year, through a roughly equal (1:1) split of multi-family and low-rise single-family. Already this represents a shift, as supply used to be slanted (3:1) toward low-rise. (I don’t know when exactly this was the case, but Calthorpe mentions the figure in his interview.)
Moving on from El Camino, Calthorpe and his team then ran a similar exercise for the five-county inner Bay area. And here they found that some 700 miles of commercial land could produce up to 1.3 million multi-family homes at “reasonable densities.” This was then expanded to the entire state of California and the number increased to 10 million new homes.
Of course, as we have talked about before on this blog, not all of this land might actually be feasible for development. Sometimes the math doesn’t work even at a zero land cost; you might need a negative land cost in order to pencil a new development. Meaning, you might need to be paid, perhaps through some sort of subsidy.
So what Calthorpe and the team did was use MapCraft to quickly run development feasibilities on the above sites. They had it run 6 different pro formas using local rents, construction costs, city fees, and so on. And what they determined was that this 10 million number drops down to 2 million when you apply the economic realities of the world.
As a disclaimer, I’m not at all familiar with MapCraft. But I’m going to take this number at face value and say that this is still a lot of new homes. And this is what people are hoping for come July 1 of this year.
There is a new book out right now about the United Arab Emirates called 50U. It has been fifty years since the confederation of the seven Gulf states was officially declared (December 2, 1971), and so the book is a celebration of that. The format is 50 portraits of people, places, and plants (yes, plants) that tell the story of the UAE.
Included in the book is an excerpt of a 2009 talk by architect Rem Koolhaas (of OMA) about his reading of Dubai. ArchDaily published an abridged version over here and I thought it was an interesting read. Few people think about cities as deeply as Koolhaas does, and few can express their thoughts in such a rational and Dutch-like way. Here’s a snippet of the talk:
I came here first in 2004. We were asked to do a major building on the site which is marked by the flag. Then, two years ago it was the exact moment… I became increasingly nervous about the mission of architecture and the uses of architecture. And I really became almost desperate… that the incredible pressure of the market economy was forcing architecture itself into increasingly extravagant conditions. Seemingly, Dubai seemed to be the epicenter of that extravagance. So, I came with deeply ambivalent feelings. It seemed as if the idea of the city and the metropolis itself had been almost turned into a caricature, not a coherent entity but maybe a patchwork of theme parks. And those themes would become the bogus and increasingly bizarre characters that were perhaps partly mythical and partly real.
I’ve only been to Dubai once. It was back in 2008 or 2009. And to be honest, it wasn’t my favorite city; I think primarily because I enjoy walking cities and Dubai is largely the opposite of that. It felt like a patchwork of theme parks that you had to drive around to — ideally in an exotic car while being as flashy as possible.
Now if these theme parks were within walking distance (and the drinks were good), that would be an entirely different story.
I stumbled upon this multi-unit housing project in Vienna because I thought it looked beautiful and I started thinking about the solid wall-to-window ratio on its facades. But it turns out that this project is far more than just a pretty face.
It’s actually a social housing project on the outskirts of Vienna, where the city transitions into the countryside. And it incorporates a number of interesting design features:
The complex is heated using groundwater heat pumps (geothermal) and domestic hot water is provided with the help of rooftop solar panels.
The structural system consists of concrete slabs and columns (no shear walls) and was all poured in place. But the envelope consists of “prefabricated thermo-brick walls” which were craned into place (see below image). The curving balconies also look to be prefabricated elements.
The suites have been designed with a saw tooth pattern and the circulation mirrors this through a zig zagging pattern. The result is units that are akin to what you will find at King Toronto (Bjarke Ingels), though on average the suites here look to be bigger than what we typically design in Toronto.
The zig zagging corridors also incorporate skylights that let light down into the middle of the building. I think these run through multiple floors as well, and not just through the top floor of the building.
This certainly looks like a nice place to live.
Sources: Architecture by trans_city (Christian Aulinger, Mark Gilbert). Photography by Daniel Hawelka and David Schreyer. Both via ArchDaily.
I have come to the realization that I don’t get nearly enough emails throughout the day (sarcasm), and so I’ve just subscribed to Overview’s daily post.
Overview is a company that uses satellite and aerial imagery to show how humans and natural forces are shaping the earth. In addition to a daily post, their work includes stories, books, prints, and various other projects and collaborations. It’s pretty cool stuff.
One example of a partnership is this one here with ArchDaily, where they look at urban block patterns around the world. Everywhere from Barcelona to Belo Horizonte. I think many of you will enjoy flipping through these aerials.
And if you’re interested in this topic (you know, urban morphology), you may also enjoy this book by Ildefons Cerdà called, The General Theory of Urbanization 1867. Cerdà, and his work, were instrumental in shaping Barcelona at a time when the word “urbanization” didn’t even really exist.
This is an interesting article by ArchDaily, looking at the “evolution of the house plan in Europe” between 1760 and 1939. The article focuses on London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Moscow and includes floor plans, photographs, as well as well-known illustrations like the one shown above. Created by Bertall in 1845, the drawing shows a section through a Parisian house and is called The Five Floors of the Parisian World.
What it shows is the declining opulence that used to exist in Paris’ apartment blocks as you moved upward. If you were rich, you lived on the second floor, right above the ground floor lobby. The ceilings were higher on this floor and maybe had a balcony overlooking the street. If you lived on the third floor it meant that you were a less rich. And if you lived in the top floor attic, you were poor. That is what this comic is showing.
Now, all of this changed over time as new technologies, namely the elevator, were brought to multi-family buildings. All of a sudden it became convenient to live higher up and all of a sudden people wanted better views and to get further away from the chaos of the street. What I’m curious about, though, is how posterity dealt with the lower ceiling heights on these upper floors.
MAD Architects recently completed its first project in the United States at 8600 Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. It’s interesting (and beautiful) in that it was designed to resemble a village of gabled residences sitting on top of a green hillside.
The green hillside is actually a three-storey concrete podium that is covered in what is said to be the largest living walls in the country. The gabled houses on top are wood-frame construction and were assembled to create an open-air courtyard in the middle of the site. Eighteen residences in total. Prices starting from USD 3.7 million (as of May 2019).
At five storeys, I suppose you would call this a mid-rise building. The site area is about 25,700 square feet and the building area is not even 48,000 square feet, according to ArchDaily. So the overall density on the site is actually remarkably low. At least compared to what we’re accustomed to building in Toronto. It might be dense for Beverly Hills.
I would love to see the development math for a site like this. After I got over the architecture, the first thing I thought was, “you could never build a mid-rise building like this in Toronto.” I suspect it’s also not obvious in Los Angeles. And you probably need “starting from 3.7 million” in order for it to pencil.
At this point, it is well known that I am a big fan of neon. It is something that we have obviously worked to incorporate into our Junction House project through things like our rooftop placemaking sign (it’s actually LED), our collaboration with local artist Thrush Holmes (his work incorporates neon), and the neon popup gallery that we hosted last year in collaboration with the Downtown Yonge BIA and Neon Demon Studio. So it was no surprise that a friend of mine sent me an ArchDaily article this morning talking about how neon lighting shapes architecture.
What I like about the piece, and the pictures it includes, is that it emphasize the spatial qualities and potential of neon. For a lot of us, neon has come to represent brash advertising. Neon is bright. That was and is great for advertising. But that association has been changing. Even cities like Hong Kong, which have for so long been synonymous with neon, are starting to lose that form of advertising. I’m not saying that loss is a good thing. But I do think that we are now seeing neon being used in completely different ways. It has become more creative. It has become architectural.
Below is an excerpt from the ArchDaily article that speaks to this same idea. But what you really want to do is shoot over and look at all of the photos.
Yet because neon is so fundamentally associated with signage, which can feel limiting or kitschy for some architects, it is often neglected. Rudi Stern writes further that “Unfortunately for many architects, neon is the last shoddy pink ‘pizza’ sign they have seen, and they summarily reject a medium that offers great promise as a spatial and environmental element.” Thus, despite its historical and commercial associations, neon has the potential to be even more than retro symbols or cosmopolitan phrases. Abstract designs, atmospheric colors, and the kinetic properties of light combined can completely alter a space even without references to a historical aesthetic or explicit messages. In the images of the With.It Home below, BodinChapa Architects have used neon in a non-representational way to create a stunningly memorable James Turrell-esque room that is simultaneously tranquil and radiant. Neon light has the power to completely transform a room even if used in as simple a way as lining the corners of the ceiling, due to the unique properties of light in conversation with the sense of space itself. If architects can move past its commercial associations and investigate its relationship to architectural space, neon can become an even more powerful atmospheric element than it is already.
It felt like a frenetic year for me, and so I have to say that I’ve been really enjoying this holiday break. I needed the downtime. I needed the time to think and strategize. And I got all of that this holiday. (The only thing that would make this break even better would be some more snow on the mountains.)
I’m super excited for the new year and what’s ahead, but before getting into that, I thought it would be worthwhile to look back at what happened in 2014.
I was initially going to list out some of my thoughts, but then I figured that a better way would be to simply list out the most read Architect This City posts. That way it’s my (daily) thoughts, but curated according to what readers cared about most this past year.
Depending on who you ask, the current condo boom in Toronto might be viewed as either a good thing or a bad thing (most will have an opinion). Some people think we’re simply building too many condos. And that too many of them are small, crappy, and geared towards investors – as opposed to end-users.
While I do agree that we could be doing more to create complete communities – that is communities which serve everyone from young singles to families with 3 kids – I think there are also a lot of positives associated with Toronto’s condo obsession (full disclosure: I’m a real estate developer). It has made us more sustainable, more reliant on alternate forms of (non-car) transport, and it has made us a generally more exciting place to live.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t do better.
Lately I’ve been wondering about how other cities do it. Specifically, those European cities that somehow seem to always be able to build awesome housing projects. So today I thought I would pick one and profile it. What I really wish I had was a financial pro forma to share with you all, but in the absence of that, I’ll try and back into some of the numbers on my own.
Shown above is the 9-storey Charlotte Apartments in Berlin. It was developed by WI Concept and designed by Michels Architecture Office. I chose this building because I think it’s an attractive one and because it’s of the (mid-rise) scale that Toronto is trying to promote along its many avenues. Here are the stats I was able to find online:
Site area: 347 square meters / 3,735 square feet
Building area: 3,000 square meters / 32,291 square feet (says gross floor area, but I don’t know if that means the same thing as it does here)
Construction costs: €3.6 million / C$5,065,691 (as of today’s rate)
Units: 28 (sold within 1 week of launch)
Market: ~70% of buyers in Berlin are believed to be foreign investors
Now, if we were actually building a development pro forma, we’d want to get a lot more granular in our calculations than what I’m about to do. We’d want to know gross construction area, net saleable areas, and so on. But for the purposes of this post (and because I have very little information), I’m going to simplify and do a back of the napkin set of calculations.
Based on above, the FSI (or density) is about 8.65 (32,291 sf / 3,735 sf). That’s roughly in line with many of the residential developments we’re seeing in downtown Toronto. The average unit size works out to be about 1,153 sf (32,291 sf / 28 units), but in reality it would be less if that 32,291 number is truly the gross floor area. You would need to subtract the corridors and other non-saleable areas from it before doing this calc. Either way, that is big compared to most downtown Toronto condos, but small for Berlin standards according to this ArchDaily article. Finally, if we look at construction costs, we get $157 per square foot in Canadian dollars ($5.065M / 32,291 sf). That’s low. I wonder what the land costs were.
Again, these numbers are rough rough. But I wanted to try and dissect a European development project and compare it to Toronto. The most surprising figure seems to be the low construction costs. If you have any additional insights, I would love to hear from you in the comment section below.
