Brandon Donnelly

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.

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Tag: architecture

  • Louis Vuitton’s Big Duck

    When I first saw this picture of Louis Vuitton’s flagship store in Manhattan I thought it was AI. That is where we are right now. When something looks wild, I just automatically assume it’s fake. But alas, it’s not fake. Louis Vuitton is renovating their flagship store at the corner of 57th Street and 5th Avenue and so, naturally, they decided to completely cover it with luggage facade wraps.

    These wraps make the entire building look like six grey trunks stacked on top of each other and are a nod to a 19th century luggage design from the company. They even used real metal details throughout. Apparently the heaviest luggage handle weighs something like 5,000 pounds.

    This is wild and remarkable in so many ways. The scale of it is remarkable. This is a 15 storey building concealed entirely by luggage trunks. It also speaks to the scale and dominance of New York as a city. Not every city can absorb a pile of giant luggage trunks and not bat an eye. But in New York, it’s just another noteworthy thing within its relentless urban grid.

    I also can’t help but think of the work of architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. In 1972, they published a book called Learning from Las Vegas. And in it, they defined two types of contrasting buildings: decorated sheds and ducks. Decorated sheds are, as the name suggests, nondescript buildings. Think big box stores. These buildings get their specificity from signage and other ornament because, without this, they’d just be nondescript sheds.

    Duck buildings are, on the other hand, buildings that take on a symbolic form. In other words, their shape and construction tell you what they’re all about. The term duck comes from an actual building that looks like a duck, namely The Big Duck on Long Island. This is a building that was built in the 1930s to help promote the owner’s duck farming business and is now on the US National Register of Historic Places.

    The Big Duck is and was an actual building, whereas Louis Vuitton’s trunks are just temporary construction wrap. So they’re not exactly the same thing. Still, the similarities are there. Both were erected to promote their respectiveness businesses. And both tell you, through their form, what’s meant to happen inside. So in this sense, Louis Vuitton has just created its own Big Duck.

    Photo by Brad Dickson via Dezeen

  • Dupont Street to become a complete street

    The City of Toronto is proposing to turn Dupont Street — between Dundas Street West and Davenport Road — into a “complete street.”

    Here’s the area in question:

    It’s 4.7 kilometers long.

    And here’s how the city thinks about complete streets:

    “Complete streets” are streets that are designed to be safe for all users: people who walk, bicycle, take transit or drive, and people of varying ages and levels of ability. They also consider other uses like sidewalk cafés, street furniture, street trees, utilities, and stormwater management.

    Right now, the city is in the public consultation phase. If you’d like to provide your feedback, you can do that here. You have until October 30th. The online tool is also pretty neat. You can drop comments on specific areas of the street. And already the map has been totally filled up.

    This is an important and busy artery in midtown. I use it all the time as a pedestrian, cyclist, and driver. It’s not the best street, though. Yesterday it took me 45 minutes to drive from one end of it to the other. Along with better street design, this part of the city could use better transit.

    I’m looking forward to seeing how Dupont ultimately gets designed.

  • Design solves problems

    A long time ago, I attended an architecture presentation that started with talking about cabover trucks. See example above. Cabover is the name for trucks where the cab sits above the front axle. This is different from more conventional trucks where the engine sits in front of the driver. Here you get more of a flat face. Again, see above.

    This truck style is credited to Viktor Schreckengost, who first came up with the design in 1932 and later patented it. And it’s a pretty big deal in the history of trucking because of the simple fact that this design shaved several feet off the length of the tractor.

    This meant something in the 1930s because, at the time, total truck lengths in the US were limited to 42 feet (12.8 m). So by minimizing the depth of the tractor, it created room for a bigger trailer. In building terms, Viktor had found a way to increase the ratio of rentable area to gross construction area.

    The point of this example in the presentation was to show that good design solves real problems and that this is how their firm approaches projects. They aim to create value. And I remember this really resonating with me, because it’s how I also like to think about design.

    Admittedly, there is an element of design that involves making things look good. That’s important too. But it’s linked to solving problems. For example, one thing you’ll often hear people say when talking about design is that things should look “intentional.” You want to feel that real thought was put into it.

    Arbitrary is bad. For some reason, it doesn’t look as good.

    Well, what could be more intentional than solving problems and creating value?

    Image: Wikipedia

  • Density vs. infrastructure in Liberty Village

    A beautiful new 43-storey rental building was just approved in Toronto’s Liberty Village neighborhood. More info about the project can be found, here. Not surprisingly, some people in the community were against it. Here is a recent article that blogTO published talking about people who live in high-rises not wanting a new high-rise next to them.

    One argument that is being made is that the neighborhood is already full. It has reached its density limit. We also hear this about the City of Toronto as a whole. But we know this isn’t true. Architect Naama Blonder recently did a study that found we could fit another 12 million people within our boundaries with more efficient land use policies.

    This particular site in Liberty Village is also about 400 meters from a future subway stop on the Ontario Line. So it is exactly where we should be putting more density. The problem today is that the area is suffering from a massive infrastructure deficit. The road network is inadequate and the King streetcar hasn’t been prioritized.

    It’s no wonder the area feels full. But the reality is that there are lots of examples of highly livable neighborhoods from around the world with much higher population densities. The difference is that they have the right infrastructure, the right public realms, and the right modal splits.

    Liberty Village will get there as well and it’s already underway. For a preview of the future, check out the City of Toronto’s Public Realm Strategy for the area. It was published in April 2024 and it includes things like new streets, new mid-block connections, and new parks. It is what the area needs and it’s exciting to see it happening.

  • Paseo Mallorca 15

    This is a beautiful apartment building in the center of Palma. Brutalist ground floor. Operable wooden slats up the rest of the facade. It feels right at home in this climate. It’s also a passive-energy building that uses 90% less energy compared to a “conventional” apartment building. The technical classification is nZEB (or a nearly zero energy building). It’s pretty amazing that with only 9 apartments, these kinds of projects pencil here. Perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s also a single-stair building.

    The architect is OHLAB. For more information, here’s their website.

  • Money and beauty

    I’ve told versions of this story before, but I was reminded of it again today.

    When I was in grad school studying both architecture and real estate, I used to walk back and forth across campus and jump between two very different kinds of academic experiences. On the one side of campus, it was taboo to talk about money. And on the other end, the only important thing to talk about was money. (I am exaggerating in both cases, but I think only slightly.)

    Given that I was studying and genuinely interested in both, this always felt like a weird false dichotomy. I mean, why not care about, you know, multiple things? But that’s generally not the way it was. Talking about money tainted the purity of design. And talking about things like design and beauty felt out of place and less serious in a room where cap rates were being debated and serious financial models were being honed.

    This is not to say that nobody was thinking across disciplines. I was in a joint program, after all. I can also remember attending a lunch & learn where a student asked a seasoned real estate executive what he should study in addition to finance. The response he got was something along the lines of, “the furthest thing from finance. Study something that will give you a different perspective on real estate.”

    I remember this really resonating with me — probably because I was searching for breadcrumbs to make me feel like less of an outsider at Wharton. Still, this came across as a unique perspective at the time.

    Knowing how money stuff works is absolutely fundamental. (We need to teach more of it in schools to young people.) And as a developer, it all starts with managing risk, executing (i.e. doing what we said we would do), and being an honest steward of other people’s money. Don’t do this, and you likely won’t be a developer for very long.

    But then, what else? What unique insights can we bring to the assumptions that feed a finely honed model? Fast forward to today and this is now the basis for how the Globizen team aims to look at real estate opportunities. We want to cover all ends of campus. And that means we are more than okay talking about unserious things like design and beauty.

  • Detroit is back!

    Fascinatingly, buildings are always a product of their time.

    Detroit’s Book Tower, for example, started construction in 1916. This is right around the time that Detroit became the 4th largest city in the US (after New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia). From 1910 to 1920, the city’s population grew by about 113% to nearly a million people (more people than the city has today).

    Because this was the time, the tower was obviously grand. It totalled almost half a million square feet of office space (483,973 sf to be exact, according to Wikipedia). It had a large 3-story atrium with an ornate glass dome. And up until the 1970s, it seems that it remained a desirable office address on Washington Boulevard.

    But as we all know, things changed for Detroit. Grand and ornate no longe made economic sense. And so the owners at the time, whoever they were, covered up the ornate dome, filled in the floors of the atrium, and presumably did whatever they could to eek out as much leasable square footage as possible. Necessity trumped grandeur.

    Then in 2007, the then-landlord filed for Chapter 11 protection. And in 2009, the last tenant left the building, leaving it 100% vacant — or “unencumbered by tenants” as we like to say in the business.

    Thankfully in 2015, Dan Gilbert of Bedrock came along to do what he does, and acquired the building for a reported $30 million. This works out to about $61 psf for what was once the tallest building in Detroit and one of its most prestigious office addresses. Things change.

    But what Bedrock has done since is work to return the building to what architect Louis Kamper had originally created nearly a century ago. The atrium is back. The ornate glass dome is back. And there are now 229 apartments, 117 extended-stay hotel rooms, 3 food and beverage concepts, and about 40,000 sf of office space. Official website, here.

    What an awesome way to say, “Detroit is back!”

    Photos: Rebekah Witt via Fast Company

  • Massive transfer slabs

    Sometime next month we’re going to be pouring a large concrete transfer slab at the second floor of One Delisle. Its function is to take the loads coming down from the entire tower above it and “transfer” them onto new structural elements, before being brought down to our mat foundation at the bottom of the parking garage.

    Put differently — and, as always, I should warn you that I’m not a structural engineer — a transfer is used whenever you have a change in your structural grid and the loads don’t have a straight path down to your foundations. Because whenever this happens, you’re now introducing moment forces and those need to be dealt with structurally.

    Transfer slabs are relatively common here in Toronto (which isn’t the case in every market), but they are expensive and they consume a lot of depth. In the case of One Delisle, our level two transfer slab is 1.8 meters deep and it’s going to contain about 1,200 m3 of concrete. (Some of you might also recall that One Delisle’s mat foundation is over 4m deep.)

    We were reviewing this with the team today and we think that we’ll be able to pour about 100 m3 of concrete per hour. That means that this slab will take about 12 hours to pour! This requires a lot of coordination. Neighbors need to be notified, pumps need to be on standby in case of a breakdown, and so on.

    Another major consideration is heat. When concrete cures it generates a lot of it. And with a thick slab like this one, I am told that we run the risk of the middle starting to overheat (especially with the hot weather that we’ve been having lately). The guideline limit is 60 degrees Celsius, so we’ll be monitoring it for probably about 1-2 weeks following the pour.

    I find these details fascinating. Maybe some of you do too. So once it’s poured, I’ll share a few photos.

  • Infinity and beyond

    Earlier this week, Oklahoma City Council approved plans for the 1,907-foot-tall Legends Tower. If built according to these plans, it would become the 5th tallest building in the world and the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere.

    Currently, the tallest building in the US is One World Trade Center at 1,776 feet (581 meters). This is a symbolic height meant to reference the date of the Declaration of Independence.

    To be even more specific, though, the Legends Tower wasn’t approved at 1,907 feet. As I understand it, it was approved with with an unlimited height. Meaning, if the developers wanted to go even taller in the future, they could.

    This is sort of unique. Usually when a new by-law/ordinance is passed, it includes a maximum height in feet/meters. In this case, I guess they’ll just use an infinity symbol and call it a day.

    Here are some quotes from Dezeen:

    “AO is delighted that the Oklahoma City Council has approved the development team’s request for unlimited height for the Boardwalk at Bricktown,” said AO.

    “We are grateful that the City Council has embraced the vision of Matteson Capital and the entire design team to transform the city into a global destination.”

    The obvious question is “will this get built?” And I don’t know the answer to that. But I do think that infinity is just as symbolic as 1,776 feet.

  • Field Guide to Indoor Urbanism

    A few months ago, one of my old professors from architecture school — Phu Hoang — reached out to me through this blog. That’s one of the benefits of writing publicly — it becomes your calling card. In this case, it had been at least 16 years since I was in his design studio.

    We connected over a call. He told me about his and Rachely’s firm, MODU Architecture. And he let me know that he’s no longer teaching at Penn. He is now the Head of Architecture of the Knowlton School at Ohio State University.

    Then, following the call, he was kind enough to send me a copy of his new book, Field Guide to Indoor Urbanism:

    The typical approach to modern building design is to have clearly defined boundaries between interior and exterior spaces. The outside is the outside. And the inside is a climate-controlled space that is, for the most part, sealed to the outside.

    Most of us spend the vast majority of our lives in these latter spaces. In fact, since the advent of modernism and the International Style over a century ago, the general idea has been that these spaces can and should be mostly the same.

    HVAC systems make it so that you don’t really need to worry about context or the environment. What works in Toronto can work in Phoenix. You just need to dial up your cooling loads.

    This is so much the case that whenever I’m in a city with a fairly benign climate, such as somewhere in California, I always find myself fascinated by the fluidity between interior and exterior spaces. It’s such a foreign concept to me that it stands out: “Wait, how is this not sealed?

    Indoor urbanism, on the other hand, makes the argument that this binary approach is the wrong way to think about spaces. Here’s an excerpt from a recent Metropolis article about MODU:

    They call this approach “indoor urbanism,” which privileges the blurred boundary between what has traditionally been considered interior space and exterior space. This in-between space–straddling open and closed, artificial and natural–deserves architects’ keen attention, especially as the planet warms. “Indoor urbanism recognizes that architecture and cities are situated on an environmental continuum, as a matter of degrees rather than absolutes,” write Hoang and Rotem in Field Guide.

    Examples of this thinking can be found throughout their work. This project in Jackson, Wyoming is one of my favorites both because I love Jackson and because it’s a cold and snowy place. And yet, even in this climate zone, their design includes for several “semi-exterior areas” that serve to connect you to nature.

    This is a decidedly different way to think about architecture and urbanism. But as our climate crisis intensifies, it’s only going to become more relevant.