Tag: architecture school

• Beer over water and the contributions of John Snow

  The work of John Snow is instrumental to the field of epidemiology. In the mid-19th century, during what was the third major outbreak of cholera, he created the following map showing the clusters of cholera cases in London’s Soho neighborhood. Stacked rectangles were used to indicate the number of cholera cases in a particular location. This was a major breakthrough for the fight against cholera because, at the time, it wasn’t clear what was causing it. According to Wikipedia, there were two main competing theories. There was the miasma theory, which posited that cholera was caused by bad particles in the air. And there was the germ theory, which posited that cholera could be passed along through food and/or water.

  

  By mapping the clusters of cases, Snow discovered a concentration of incidents in around the intersection of Broad Street and Cambridge Street (now Lexington Street) where a water pump was located that drew water from the Thames. This led Snow to the conclusion that it was maybe a bad idea to offer up polluted river water as drinking water. And sure enough, when the pump was shut off and residents were directed to other nearby pumps, the incidences of cholera began to decline. The germ theory had proven to be true.

  The first time I saw John Snow’s map was in architecture school. Perhaps many of you have seen it as well. It is often used to illustrate the potential of visual representations to not only tell a story, but to teach the creator what that story actually is. In hindsight, it may seem obvious that polluted river water is something that we maybe shouldn’t drink, but it wasn’t at the time. This map helped people understand that. Today, we have far more sophisticated tools available to us, but we still have a lot to learn and we’re doing that every day — particularly during a pandemic.

  One other thing worth mentioning is that there are a few exceptions to Snow’s findings. Supposedly, many of the workers in a nearby brewery were able to completely avoid the cholera infection during the outbreak by only drinking their own brew. Some say it is because the brewery had its own water source, whereas others say it is because the brewing process — the water is boiled — kills the cholera bacteria. Either way, I think the moral of this story is pretty clear: when in doubt, choose beer over water.

  Map: Wikipedia

  2020.03.30

• The new studio geography

  If any of you have gone to architecture school (or know someone who went to architecture school), you’ll know that everything revolves around something called studio. Studio – that’s really all you need to say – is worth many multiples of your other classes and consumes an even greater multiple of your time. What time will you be in studio? How’s studio going? I was in studio really late last night. This is how the conversations go.

  So I was intrigued by Seth Godin’s post this morning comparing “working in a studio” to working in a factory. The latter, he says, relies on compliance: “More compliance leads to more profits. Do what you’re told, faster and cheaper, repeat.” And this was very much the narrative of the 20th century and was the model that empowered small-town America to thrive (see yesterday’s post).

  However, the studio is different. Here is how Godin defines it:

  The studio, on the other hand, is about initiative. Creativity, sure, but mostly the initiative to make a new thing, a better thing, a process that leads to better.

  It’s peer to peer. The hierarchy is mostly gone, because the tasks can be outsourced. So all that’s left is leadership.

  Initiative plus responsibility. Authority is far less important, as are the traditional measures of productivity.

  It is not difficult to tell the two apart, which is how Godin ends his post. But it is worth noting that the studio model also thrives in a different kind of geography, compared to the factory model. So not only is the studio itself a different place, it also wants to situate itself in a different kind of place. So in a way, what we are seeing today is the new studio geography.

  2018.12.15

• City building reading list (and an event)

  Today’s post is going to be about a handful of things that have caught my attention.

  – Gary Hack, who is the former dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, recently published a book called Site Planning: International Practice. It is a textbookish guide to planning processes, new technologies, and sustainability, with an emphasis on rapidly urbanizing countries. Thank you to my friend Michael Geller for bringing this to my attention.

  – Sidewalk Labs Toronto is opening a new experimental workspace here in Toronto at 307 Lake Shore Boulevard East (Queens Quay & Parliament) on Saturday, June 16th from 12 – 6pm. It’s an old fish processing plant that they have turned into their office. The team will work there during the week and on the weekends they will open to the public to showcase what they’re up to. Register for the June 16th event, here. I just did.

  – Alexandra Lange has a recent piece in the New Yorker called, The Hidden Women of Architecture and Design. It’s about the important role that women have played in the “design of childhood”, which is the title of a book by Lange. There’s also a short but interesting story about Detroit’s Lafayette Park (Mies van der Rohe) at the beginning of the article.

  – Finally, here is a blog post by Witold Rybczynski where he talks about the shortcomings of architectural education. Obscure theories. Technical or made-up jargon. And no concern for budgets and schedules. I have always shared a similar view and have long felt that there needs to be more business school in architecture school.

  Hopefully there’s something in here that is of interest to you.

  2018.06.07

• A unique taste in buildings

  

  A condo developer friend of mine once told me something along the lines of this: “Brandon, I have generally learned over the years that if I like something, it probably means the general public [our purchasers] isn’t going to like it. And that’s because if I like it, there’s probably something unique or quirky about it.”

  When he told me this it made perfect sense to me, because there’s a well documented taste divide that seems to exist between architects and design-types and non-architects and non-design-types (whatever this latter categorization means).

  A few years ago The Architects’ Journal published an article referencing a 1987 study that took a group of students – some architecture students and some non-architecture students – and asked them to rate the attractiveness of a series of photos containing both unfamiliar people and buildings.

  What they discovered was that most people had similar views on the attractiveness of the people. I guess hotness is somewhat universal. But when it came to the buildings, the viewpoints were completely opposite. The architecture students’ favorite buildings were what everyone else disliked the most.

  The conclusion in the article: “Professionals are, empirically, the very worst judges available of what people want or like in the built environment.”

  Photo by Simon Goetz on Unsplash

  2018.04.28

• ULI Hines Student Competition comes to Toronto

  I was speaking with a Penn (my alma mater) student this evening about career options in development and he mentioned to me that he recently participated in the 2018 ULI Hines Student Competition. He also mentioned that this year’s “study site” is in Toronto. (It’s the BMW Toronto dealership between the West Don Lands and East Harbor.)

  For those of you unfamiliar with the ULI Hines Competition, it’s an annual student competition (now in its 16th year) that encourages collaboration among “future real estate developers and the many allied professions, such as architecture, landscape architecture, historic preservation, engineering, finance, and others.” 

  Each year there is a real life study site and multi-disciplinary teams compete for $50,000. I participated in my 2nd year of graduate architecture school and we received honorable mention. So no $50,000, sadly. But it was a valuable experience and I would recommend it to any student who plans to be involved in the built environment after graduation.

  I am looking forward to seeing what the finalists come up with for this site. I think that the study site being in Toronto – and in particular this location – speaks to the momentum that has developed in this part of the city as a result of the West Don Lands, East Harbor, Sidewalk Toronto, and the various planned infrastructure investments. 

  Here is a copy of this year’s briefing materials.
  Good luck to all of the teams that participated.

  2018.02.16

• We’re working with superkül

  

  Today I am excited to announce that we are working with superkül architects on a new mid-rise condo project here in Toronto. Details about the site and project to follow.

  I am excited about this for a few reasons.

  It should go without saying that I love their work. Check out Compass House, SHIFT Cottage, Harbord Towns, and Oben Flats Queen East.

  You may also notice that they work at a variety of different scales and have a lot of single-family / custom home work. This was important to us because one of our goals for this project is to create really great homes within a boutique building. Emphasis on home.

  The other exciting piece is that one of the founding principals of superkül – Meg Graham – was one of my professors in architecture school. So there’s a sense of coming full circle.

  This matters to me because when I became a developer I told myself that I was going to be the kind of developer that gave a shit about design and actively worked to improve the built environment.

  I guess what I’m saying is that there’s a feeling of continuity. I haven’t forgotten where I came from, which was the world of architecture.

  Image: Blok Design

  2017.05.09

• A sneak peek of One Spadina Crescent

  Earlier this week I got a sneak peek of One Spadina Crescent – the new building for the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. 

  The renovation and addition was designed by the Boston-based firm NADAAA. And let me tell you, it’s absolutely spectacular.

  I was in a rush at the time and I didn’t have my real camera on me, but I managed to quickly grab this snap:

  

  It’s of the third floor. 

  What you see in the middle are steps leading down to an “open bleacher space” that functions as a crit space and as an oculus that brings light into the core of the building. In the middle of the building is a large flex space.

  Because the building effectively sits in the middle of Spadina Avenue, the windows on the right side (above) look directly up the street, as if you were standing in the middle of it. I wish I had betters photos to share with you all.

  When you’re an architecture student, you spend almost all of your waking time in studio. I can certainly think of worse buildings to be cooped up in. I’m excited to see it in full swing come September.

  Click here if you’d like to see renderings of the building.

  2017.05.05

• Coworking, coliving, and an old architecture school project

  Coworking spaces are big business.

  One of the biggest of those companies is WeWork. As of last month (November 2015), the company had raised close to a billion dollars from investors like JPMorgan Chase, Harvard Management, and Benchmark Capital, and was valued at $10 billion. (Remember though, this is in the private not public markets.)

  If you’re unfamiliar with coworking spaces, check out this post from The Spaces. It’s a great demonstration of how beautiful these spaces can be.

  All of this is interesting because it speaks to the changing nature of work. There are a lot of people freelancing, participating in the “online gig economy” and working on new ideas. And in many of these cases, they don’t want or need traditional office space and/or they want the community that many of these coworking spaces afford – both offline and online.

  But it’s not just the office that is changing. It’s also potentially living spaces. Since 2014, WeWork has been talking about their new coliving concept, WeLive. The idea here is to combine smaller living spaces with larger common areas and create an overall live-work community. And they are not the only ones thinking about this.

  Below is a building section of what this might look. It’s from a Vornado Realty presentation. They are working with WeWork to deliver their new WeLive concept in Crystal City, Virginia.

  

  It’s so interesting to see this concept come to fruition. Back in 2008 when I was in architecture school, I worked with a classmate of mine and designed a modular coliving apartment building. It was called the Philly Flex Dwelling and it worked like this:

  

  The idea here was to start with standard floor plates and use a structural exoskeleton to minimize interior columns. This way you could insert whatever prefabricated modules you wanted and also re-purpose the structure should you want to change the building’s use in the future. 

  This is not that dissimilar from what was originally proposed for One Bloor West here in Toronto. Though the goal there was column-free retail spaces. 

  The yellow spaces are the shared common areas and the remaining spaces are the residential living “pods.” We also designed a “solar skin” that was perfectly tuned to the building’s orientation and location in Philadelphia. The idea here was to maximize winter sun (for heating) and minimize summer sun (to keep the building cool).

  That was a fun project to work on.

  2015.12.21

• Products people love

  

  https://500px.com/embed.js

  I recently heard someone say, in a pejorative way, that all real estate developers think of what they build as “products.” I imagine this is in contrast to thinking in terms of buildings as spaces for people to live, raise a family, do their life’s work, and so on.

  When I heard this I immediately thought to myself, yeah, we (or at least I) do think of our spaces as products. But I also didn’t see it as a negative thing.

  In my view, there’s no reason that classifying something as a “product” has to make it any less beautiful, functional, and/or filled with design intent. My iPhone is a product. The wine on my shelf that somebody labored over is a product. The chair I’m sitting on right now is a product. All of these items were produced by people and then I consumed them because I liked what those people had made.

  When I was completing my first master’s in architecture and real estate, I used to walk back and forth across campus between the design school and the business school. And in these two places, we talked about bricks-and-mortar in very different ways.

  In the business school, buildings were the proverbial widget. How much does this widget cost to produce? How much can I sell or rent this widget for in the market? And how do I scale up my business so that I can sell/rent more widgets?

  On the other hand, in the design school we weren’t all that concerned with the cost of the widget or even what people would pay for it. Instead we were concerned with making it something so much more than just a plain old widget. These weren’t buildings. This was capital “A”, Architecture.

  I don’t think either school was wrong in their thinking. I just think they were missing each other. 

  Business is business. If you don’t make a profit then you’re not going to be around for very long. And while many companies can survive by making shitty products, those aren’t great businesses. The best businesses also deliver products that people absolutely love.

  So whether we call it architecture, a product, or even a widget, the goal should be to delight people. (Am I allowed to say “customer”?) Make people so happy that they have to tell their friends about it. If we’re doing that, then frankly I don’t care what we call it.

  2015.09.23

• Fun Friday: ATC subscriber map

  When I was very young I went a Montessori school here in
  Toronto. If you’re not familiar with Montessori education, it’s basically a
  very open ended and independent form of learning. Students choose
  what they want to do.

  Because of this, many have argued that a Montessori
  education is actually great training to be an entrepreneur. Instead of being
  told what to do, you as a student need to figure it out on your own. See the
  parallel? Both Google founders went to Montessori school.

  When I was there (< grade 4), my absolute favorite thing
  to do was draw maps. I remember them having these large scale maps of the world where you could
  physically remove each country so that you could then trace it and create your
  own maps. I spent a lot of time doing exactly that.

  To this day, I still really love maps. And I remember many
  of my friends in architecture school being the same way. So perhaps it comes
  with the territory.

  In any case, I recently started playing around with a product
  called cartoDB. And one of the things you can easily do with it is connect it
  to Mailchimp (the service that manages the ATC email newsletter) and anonymously
  map the location of each subscriber. I couldn’t resist giving it a try.

  Below is what that looks like. Not surprisingly, the highest
  concentrations of subscribers to this blog are in Canada and the US.

  

  So here’s a zoomed in version:

  

  I’ve been trying to branch out from talking about Toronto
  all the time. And that seems to be working somewhat. But I could still do a better
  job of creating more global content. I’ll try harder.

  2015.08.21