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

  • What Ben’s $270-a-month SoHo loft tells us about cities

    I clicked on this artist’s loft tour by Joshua Charow for two reasons: (1) it’s the kind of big, creative loft space that I would love to have for fun, and (2) $270 per month for a SoHo loft seems kind of reasonable.

    The artist is Ben Schonzeit. He moved into the space in 1972, and this was his all-inclusive gross rent. In today’s dollars, Gemini estimates this to be around $2,175 per month, which no longer sounds so dirt cheap, but remains very reasonable for a massive high-ceilinged loft in SoHo. (As an aside, I don’t think most people calculate in real dollars all that well.)

    There’s a lot that comes to mind with Ben’s story:

    • The creation of architectural cast iron changed the economics around ornate facades like the ones you see in SoHo. But at the time, these would have been seen as cheap replicas of the original stone stuff. Architectural purists would have derided these facades for not following the doctrine of “truth to materials.” Of course, today, many would now view SoHo as an example of “we don’t build things like we used to.”
    • Cities operate in cycles. But the flexible nature of these buildings, with their wide-open spans and large windows, allowed them to be easily repurposed.
    • Ben and his artist contemporaries were gentrifiers of the neighbourhood. And they would have long been displaced by the market had they not been protected by policy. One way to look at this dynamic is that they’re getting paid — through below-market rents — for the cultural cachet they created and the sweat equity they put into gentrifying the area.

    One of Jane Jacobs’s famous city-building mantras was, “Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.”” The reasoning for this is that new construction is expensive, whereas old, out-of-favour buildings offer the low-cost leeway needed for new ideas.

    This was certainly true when Ben was signing his lease in SoHo following deindustrialization. But is it still true today? The new idea du jour is AI, and that seems to require a lot of new buildings. Fifty years from now, will there be new SoHo stories similar to Ben’s?

  • How cities change their minds

    Toronto, like all great cities, is in constant change and transition. I did a search through my blog archive this morning (okay, AI did) and I found it telling to see the things I was writing about and advocating for in the early days, some 10 years ago.

    We used to talk about eradicating parking minimums, and it was a novelty whenever a new project was built with zero spaces. But now we don’t talk about that. Parking requirements? What are those? We let the market determine how much might be needed, if any at all.

    We also used to talk a lot about laneway housing — a lot. For decades, daring architects and urbanists were navigating labyrinthian land-use approvals to build the odd one for themselves. Oftentimes they were only permitted if a pre-existing coach house was already on the site. But as a rule, laneway houses were bad and not permitted.

    Critics were concerned that they would erode the fabric of our low-rise communities and overrun them with renters. I remember people telling me this to my face at committee meetings, and reading comments from folks who believed that laneways were unsavoury places, and so surely only questionable people would want to live in one.

    Fast forward to today, and laneway and garden suites are standard practice across Toronto. They are no longer novel. They’re just part of the housing supply that Toronto now builds. In fact, in many new housing projects, they are the most desirable suite on the property.

    Shifting scales, I also remember the challenges that the team initially faced in getting One Delisle approved at the intersection of Yonge & St. Clair. At 155m, it was the tallest development approval at the time, and it’s currently the tallest constructed building in the submarket.

    One of the criticisms was that it was not in keeping with the scale of the office buildings constructed at and around the intersection between the 1960s and the early 1980s. But is that where the line should be drawn? Let’s not forget that before its post-war development boom, Yonge & St. Clair was a predominantly low-rise area. Surely this jump in scale provoked similar concerns.

    The planning deal that was struck over the last development cycle was that low-rise neighbourhoods would go largely untouched and that density would be concentrated around transit stations and in specific nodes. These nodes were the housing supply outlets. The inverse would have been to redevelop our low-rise neighbourhoods.

    Today, the only comments I hear about One Delisle’s height are that it’s not tall enough given its beautiful architecture. Opinions clearly evolve, and sometimes the things we’re unsure about aren’t so bad after all. In fact, sometimes they can become a defining characteristic of a place.

  • The recurring promise and resistance of prefab housing

    It’s important to always remember that the idea of prefabricated housing has been around for a very long time, and yet its history is perhaps best described as a recurring cycle of revolutionary promise versus structural resistance.

    Some markets, such as Sweden and Japan, have managed to find success, with the majority of their low-rise housing now industrialized or at least involving factory-made components. But in many, or most, other markets, the prefab landscape remains checkered with bankruptcies.

    I was reminded of this when I watched this video about the 22 Parkside house in London by Richard and Su Rogers. Originally designed in 1967 for Richard’s parents, the house used prefabricated elements, such as simple steel frames and bus windows, with the hope that it might serve as a solution to Britain’s housing crisis.

    Richard jokes in the video that it never happened, but it remains a seminal modernist house nonetheless. (I love the yellow frames.) This problem is not as easy to solve as it may seem, because it’s not just a design and engineering problem.

  • The empty icon

    This week at Paris Fashion Week, Saint Laurent’s creative director Anthony Vaccarello presented an open-air show in front of the Eiffel Tower that is widely rumoured to be his last show at the fashion house. (Too bad.) The set was opulent cinema. Everything was gilded — in an elegant way, not the gaudy Trump way — including the clothes themselves.

    The overall set was intended to pay homage to the historic ballroom of the Hôtel InterContinental, where Yves Saint Laurent himself used to famously present his collections. And suspended above the runway was an enormous gold chandelier that effectively created an “urban ceiling” for the space. Here’s the full show if this at all interests you.

    But this is not a post about fashion.

    One of the things that stood out to me was the obvious relationship between the glittering Eiffel Tower and the enormous gold chandelier. It’s a good example of how you don’t necessarily need walls to frame an urban space. The hanging chandelier was all that was needed to turn a public plaza into a private salon.

    At the same time, I was struck by how sexy and glamorous Paris always manages to make what is effectively a piece of raw industrial architecture. The Eiffel Tower was immediately popular with the general public at the 1889 Exposition Universelle because of its awe-inspiring stature, but elites derided it for its lack of Parisian taste. So how then did it become so synonymous with French high culture?

    One theory is that it’s because the tower is generally useless.

    In 1964, French theorist Roland Barthes wrote an essay where he argued that the Eiffel Tower became the ultimate global symbol precisely because it means basically nothing in itself, which is why it can be so easily imbued with other symbolic meaning. The Louvre is art. The Arc de Triomphe commemorates a military victory. And Notre-Dame is religion.

    The Eiffel Tower, by contrast, is empty. It’s more or less a hollow skeleton of iron. Barthes called this an “empty signifier.” In other words, it’s a blank canvas — one that has come to symbolize everything from 19th-century industrial progress to 21st-century luxury fashion. Its greatest strength may be its uselessness.

    It can be hard to predict when something might resonate in the way that the Eiffel Tower has. The so-called cultural elites certainly didn’t get it at the time. But cities desperately need these urban symbols, and what they come to mean ultimately depends on the urban context and positioning we choose to create. It’s malleable.

    Take, for instance, the CN Tower in Toronto. There is nothing inherent to its concrete form that prevents it from symbolizing high design or civic sophistication in the way the Eiffel Tower does. The difference is in the curation: at its base, we put an aquarium; Paris brings out gilded Saint Laurent.

    Saint Laurent’s show this week was equal parts marketing for the fashion house and for the city.

  • Housing on the Line

    One of the fundamental truths about cities is that transportation and land-use planning are integral to one another. The most successful cities understand this and build density on top of transit, and build transit where density can and will go. See, once again, the Tokyo model. It’s for this reason that I think the Superkül-led conceptual project called Housing on the Line is an important one for Toronto. While the projects are speculative, they remind us that many of our transit stations are severely undeveloped, including ones we’ve only recently built. Why?

    Description:

    Housing on the Line, a conceptual project and architectural exhibition conceived and initiated by Superkül, will open to the public next Thursday, September 24th in Liberty Village. Developed in collaboration with six other firms – COMN Architects, Dubbeldam Architecture + Design, Gabriel Fain Architects, StudioAC, Studio VAARO, and Suulin – the project proposes speculative designs that integrate multi-unit residential buildings with smaller existing subway station sites along TTC Line 2 Bloor-Danforth. Each firm’s proposal treats a different subway station along Line 2 as a creative canvas for imagining innovative typologies and context-appropriate design that delivers human-scale character, enhanced amenities, and community connectivity.

    Details:

    Housing on the Line | Opening Reception
    Date: Thursday, September 24, 2026
    Time: 6:00–9:30 pm
    Location: The Bakery, 2 Fraser Ave, Toronto
    RSVP: adele@superkul.ca

    If you can’t make the opening reception next Thursday, you can also visit between September 25-27, during the hours of 10am-5pm.

    Project credits (in order): Superkül, Studio VAARO, Gabriel Fain Architects, Dubbeldam Architecture + Design

    Image credits: All renderings by Aron Lorincz Ateliers

  • Window-to-wall ratios and density in Paris

    One of the reasons Paris’s built form works so well is that the buildings aren’t all glass. The window-to-wall ratios afford a degree of privacy, despite the high densities and minimal separation distances. Imagine how different the city would feel if this wasn’t the case.

  • One of Canada’s wealthiest families unveils bold vision for St. Clair Square

    This week, Wittington Properties (which is owned by Canada’s Weston family) unveiled a bold vision for Yonge and St. Clair in midtown Toronto, which they are now calling St. Clair Square. Alex Bozikovic wrote about it, here, in the Globe and Mail.

    Here are some of the key things to know:

    • 1.6 million square feet of new construction alongside the existing shopping complex and two office towers.
    • Kohn Pedersen Fox is leading urban design and architecture for two of the three towers (37 and 46 storeys tall), as well as a private amenity building called the Ravine Club.
    • Herzog and de Meuron are the architects for the third tall building, which will be 24 storeys and house only 72 large condominium residences (you all can do the rough math on the average suite size).
    • A flagship, mass-timber cultural building (bottom right in the above AI rendering) designed by Canadian design firms Omar Gandhi and Bruce Mau Design. This building will replace Delisle Court (on the west side of Yonge, north of One Delisle) and is expected to house a 300-seat performance hall, a cafe, and potentially a new Toronto Public Library.
    • A large car-free public square (in the shape of an “L”) designed by PUBLIC WORK will “define the area” and is expected to be lined with small shops and restaurants no larger than 1,000 square feet each (fine-grained).
    • Construction is expected to begin in 2027 — on the entire complex.

    Herzog and de Meuron is one of my favourite architecture firms, and we have spoken to them over the years about potential projects in Toronto. They have yet to build a project in Canada. Though nothing ever came to fruition, I’m excited that they’re working at Yonge & St. Clair alongside such an incredible design team.

    In my humble opinion, our project One Delisle is one of Toronto’s next architectural landmarks (the building on the right in the above rendering). St. Clair Square promises to add to this rich context and layer on some cultural cachet with its flagship building. We should all be excited about the future of Yonge & St. Clair.

    Congratulations to the team!

  • How AI is transforming architectural workflows

    I recently came across an online post criticizing a Canadian Tire ad that was very clearly created by AI. The text was illegible (most AI models aren’t excellent at text). The model’s face was plasticky. And everyone was piling on, saying things along the lines of: “Shame on Canadian Tire. They should have hired a Canadian model, photographer, and graphic designer.”

    While I can appreciate where this is all coming from, the reality is that the cat is out of the bag. As I’ve said before: What is real anymore? It doesn’t matter. We all have to adapt. I have, for example, noticed a dramatic change in the architectural workflow on our projects. We are now seeing an infinite number of visualizations throughout the design process, and that is making it a lot easier to iterate and refine ideas. So much for the quick blue foam models.

    On some projects, where we have a collaborative working relationship with the design team, we now send AI renderings back and forth in group chats: “I’ve changed the material on these soffits and modified the brick coursing. What do you think?” None of it is perfect. But neither were the physical models and other tools that we used to rely on to test ideas.

    If anything, it’s overwhelming in the best possible way. The creative possibilities are endless.

  • How Junction House built laneway towns for urban families

    Junction House was designed with 7 laneway towns on the north side of the building. The above photo is from 2023, right after we installed the wayfinding signage, which is why you can see the construction fencing sitting in the laneway. Alongside Superkul (architects), we made the design decision to incorporate ground-related towns for two reasons.

    First, we are supporters of laneway housing, and one of our city-building agendas is to find ways to revitalize and animate these spaces in Toronto. Incorporating laneway towns was a natural way to do this.

    Second, we were able to tuck these two-storey suites into the same height as our ground-floor retail on the south side. This meant that, even though our sales team was advising us that these would likely sell for a relatively low price per square foot compared to the rest of the building, it was the right business decision. It was still more accretive than additional single-level retail (or retail with a far less valuable mezzanine space) or some other unproductive back-of-house space.

    As a development aside, we originally designed these towns to be raised up from the laneway, accessible via a few steps. But during the rezoning process, the city asked us to shave down the overall height of the building to meet some symbolic height in metres that the local City Councillor demanded we achieve. It was frustrating, but we complied, and that’s why the towns are designed the way they are.

    Looking back on these suites a few years later, I continue to believe that we made the right big-picture decision, especially because of how they are now being lived in. These suites have a very high percentage of families with young children — children who often make use of and play in the quiet laneway.

    In hindsight, this makes perfect sense. These are larger, grade-related suites that offer some degree of relative affordability. In my view, it’s further evidence that not all families want to flee to the suburbs. We just have to find ways to deliver the right kind of urban housing for them.

    Second photo by Doublespace Photography

  • Fast fashion is embracing luxury placemaking

    The future of physical retail continues to evolve.

    Recently, we spoke about LVMH’s approach of spending billions on some of the world’s most prime real estate. But the focus on human-centred destination experiences isn’t unique to the luxury segment. Case in point: Zara just opened a new flagship store in Shanghai designed by AIM Architecture (which appropriately stands for Authentic Immersive Matters).

    Located on a major commercial street, the store looks like this and can be generally described as follows:

    • Positioned on a prime open-air main street (versus an enclosed mall).
    • Large amphitheatre-style seating on the ground floor that connects the store to the street and encourages people to linger.
    • Beautiful interiors with not a lot of clothes on display — it has more of a gallery feel.

    It is a clear example of fast fashion adopting luxury placemaking and brand immersion. The point is not to bombard you with clothing options. The point is a human-centred space that gives you an opportunity to experience the Zara brand and then decide if its products might help you better define your sense of self. It’s a media channel, giving you something you can’t get online.