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

  • Superkül wins Designer of the Year for 2020

    Designlines Magazine is out with its annual “Designer of the Year” issue and this year’s winner for best overall designer is Superkül — the award-winning architecture firm behind Junction House. Pictured above are Andrea D’Elia, Meg Graham and the team. (The JH project team spends a lot of time in the boardroom that you see in this picture.)

    Other winners for this year include Omar Gandhi, Paolo Ferrari, and LGA Architectural Partners. They were awarded best restaurant, best product, and best public space, respectively. If you aren’t familiar with the work of these four firms, I would encourage you to check them all out. They are truly some of the best in the city. Congrats everyone.

    If you’d like to buy a copy of Designlines, you can do that here. We will also make copies available at our temporary Junction House showroom, which is located at 2843 Dundas St W.

  • Brutalism is fashionable again, kind of

    I think it’s time to make it official: Brutalism is fashionable again. Okay, kind of. According to this WSJ article, the appreciation for this style of architecture remains nowhere near universal, but the renaissance is certainly continuing. Some Brutalist structures are and have been torn down; while others are being repurposed.

    One recent example is the Balfron Tower in East London (pictured above). Designed by the Hungarian-born architect Ernő Goldfinger and completed in the 1960s as social housing, the tower is currently undergoing a £40 million renovation that will convert it to market-rate housing. Apartments start at £365,000 (USD 472,054) for a 450 square foot one bedroom.

    One notable feature are the “streets in the sky” that separate the building’s circulation (elevator core) from the actual suites. It’s a peculiar way to build and most never consider it today, but it’s very much a hallmark of the Brutalist movement. The idea was to express the building’s various functions — vertical circulation being one of them.

    I guess we just don’t build them like we used to.

    Photo: Walter Homann via the WSJ

  • A story about architecture, interiors, and branding

    I was recently having a debate with one of our architecture partners about the interrelationship between architecture, interiors, and branding. This came up because, in New York City, you almost need a name brand architect attached to your project in order to sell luxury condos.

    But this raises an interesting set of questions: How much value is driven by the quality of the architecture versus the architect’s brand? (Though, presumably you need the former in order to build the latter.) And how much of the value is actually just driven by the finishes (interiors) and the branding that you layer on after?

    This latter scenario is a depressing thought for architects. It is architecture as a kind of “empty vessel.” One that just gets dressed up for today’s Instagrammable moments. And I am sure that you can think of some examples of this. Not everything can be capital A architecture.

    But what is clear is that the most successful design-driven projects don’t think in this way. They are thoughtful and deliberate about each component, and they all work together to strengthen each other. Marketing, after all, is about telling the right story. It is always helpful when you actually have one to tell.

  • Glass curtains in Amsterdam

    For the same reasons that I liked the Interlock in London, I am a big fan of this storefront in Amsterdam by UNStudio. It is contextual, but it also something entirely new. To me, it resembles a triptych of curtains being pulled to the side, which is probably a fitting metaphor for a high fashion street. The developer is Warenar and it looks like the space is still available. So if you’re in the market for a retail storefront on Amsterdam’s PC Hooftstraat, here you are.

    Photos by Evabloem

  • The Interlock in London’s Fitzrovia

    This is a terrific infill project by Bureau de Change (architect) for HGG London (developer). It’s a five-storey mixed-use development in London’s Fitzrovia neighborhood.

    The design ambition was to respect the area’s history, materiality, and proportions, but also create something entirely new. The result is a blue clay (brick) facade that transforms and looks like this:

    And it was done by inventing a collection of misshapen blocks — 44 of them to be exact. Over 5,000 blocks were ultimately used for the facade and it was assembled on site using a 1:1 printed template. Each block came with a set of instructions.

    There’s something nice about working at this scale and being able to get into this level of detail. It’s 21st century craftsmanship (the entire facade was modeled in 3D before it was built).

    If you’d like to learn more about The Interlock, click here. All photos by Gilbert McCarragher.

  • Architectural ambition

    Alex Bozikovic’s review of the book Canadian Modern Architecture: 1967 to the Present raises something potentially troubling. Here’s what I’m talking about:

    It is by turns an exhilarating and depressing narrative: Canada, in this book, appears as a country that announced itself on the world stage in the 1960s and 1970s with incredible ambition but, since then, has retreated toward the mean.

    It is potentially troubling not only because I believe in the value of good design, but because I believe that architecture embodies the ethos and cultural context in which it was created.

    And so if you believe that our architectural ambitions have retreated toward mediocrity, you might also surmise that our overall level of ambition has retreated toward the same.

    That should be viewed as a serious problem.

  • Rue Eugene Sue and rue Simart

    At the intersection of rue Eugene Sue and rue Simart in Paris is a collection of mid-rise buildings that were constructed during Haussmann’s renovation of Paris in the second half of the 19th century. They were intended to house some 10,000 workers.

    Here’s an aerial image of that intersection from Google Maps:

    Some people, namely the folks over at The Funambulist, have compared this area to the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong as a result of its extreme population density. But unlike the Walled City, this area of Paris still exists today.

    The way these blocks are able to achieve such a high population density is by employing compact internal courtyards. In some cases they would be more accurately referred to as light wells.

    Here’s a fascinating diagram from The Funambulist showing the approximate areas of each courtyard/light well:

    I have become very interested in these sorts of European courtyard buildings. They do have their benefits. For one, they offer respite from the rest of the city. But you can also understand why the modernists were so fixated on access to light and air.

  • Rethinking Brutalism (in London)

    The Standard recently opened up its first international outpost in London. It’s a 266-room hotel housed in a 1974 Brutalist office building overlooking King’s Cross. London-based Orms (architect) was the lead consultant and they did an incredible job both preserving and modernizing the existing building.

    All of the existing windows were replaced, but otherwise the Brutalist exterior remains more or less intact.

    A tasteful 3 storey addition was placed on top of it, which required threading new steel columns through the existing waffle slabs. There’s a 1st floor transfer slab with concrete columns below it in order to pickup these new loads.

    A dedicated (and red) exterior shuttle elevator was also added to the north elevation of the building. This takes people up to the rooftop, which is a signature feature of all Standard Hotels.

    Brutalist architecture is experiencing a bit of renaissance right now. We are seeing people lament the demise of our concrete blocks from the 60s and 70s. Perhaps it’s because it’s a style/movement that is finally old enough for people to appreciate it. That’s often how these things work.

    The Standard in London is a perfect example of how this history might be both respected and repositioned.

    Images via Orms

  • The Birth of a Building

    My friend Ben Stevens has just published a book called, The Birth of a Building. It is a primer on all the ingredients that go into a new building: finance, law, urban planning, architecture, engineering, construction, and development. It is a book that I wish I wrote. But at the end of the day, it’s a lot easier to endorse a book than it is to write a book. So I am doing the former here today. If you decide to purchase the book, you’ll also find my endorsement within it. But to be clear, the only reason I’m writing about this is because Ben is a great guy and this is a great book.

    Congratulations on this huge accomplishment, Ben. For more information, click here.

  • Only the rich can afford this much nothing

    Joshua Levine’s recent (WSJ Magazine) piece on John Pawson, — the architect who “elevated nothingness to an art” — is a good read.

    It’s mostly about the country retreat that he recently completed for himself and his wife in the English countryside, but there’s also lots about his minimalist architecture, his career, his work with hotelier/developer Ian Schrager, and his passion for photography.

    I like this bit about architectural simplicity. The great irony of minimalism, and the reason why brands such as Calvin Klein and Jil Sander began working with John Pawson to leverage his aesthetic, is that it’s often more difficult to do less. Getting the details right costs money. Hence this great line from the New Yorker:

    As the New Yorker cartoon put it, “Only the rich can afford this much nothing.” Don’t expect a rebuttal from Pawson. “It is big, and it is expensive, you know. It’s sophisticated architectural simplicity. This isn’t a religious thing, and it isn’t as simple as you can go. You can go a lot simpler than this.”

    I also like what the following says about labels and what it means to be defined as something:

    Slowing down for Pawson isn’t all that slow. He takes photos constantly and has always used the camera as his third eye. In 2017, Phaidon published Spectrum, a book of his photos, many of them first posted on his Instagram (“I said, ‘Well, I’m not a photographer,’ and they said, ‘You are a photographer,’ so now I’m a photographer”).

    Click here for the rest of the article from WSJ Magazine. And if you aren’t familiar with John Pawson, here is his minimal website.

    Photo: Max Gleeson (Armonia Apartments designed by John Pawson)