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

  • Everything delivered on demand

    Last week I had something delivered from Amazon almost every single day. They weren’t necessarily big things though. One day it was a new corn broom for the patio. Another day it was a small set of hooks that I wanted to hang some lights. And the list goes on. 

    This is what Amazon wants us to do. Order every little thing, instantly, as soon as you think about it. And it’s magically convenient.

    Developers and architects are of course thinking about the implications of this shifting shopping habit on new residential developments. Usually it comes in the form of a large “Amazon room” and/or a parcel locker system. 

    I recently measured the package room in my building (geeky, I know). It’s about 10′ x 6′ and it sometimes isn’t enough for the volume of daily packages generated by ~360 units. 

    The other thing that happened last week is that my concierge said to me: “Brandon, we have become a full fledge post office with the amount of packages that come through here every day.” Every evening there’s a lineup of people waiting to collect their packages. 

    That immediately signaled to me that simply providing a larger room probably isn’t enough. This trend is only going to continue. How could we better design and optimize for this shift?

    I am sure that there many companies working on this problem. Hopefully they will surface in the comments and in my inbox following this post.

    Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel on Unsplash

  • A unique taste in buildings

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    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

  • Studio Gang’s first project in Los Angeles

    This past week Studio Gang unveiled its first project in Los Angeles, a curvaceous apartment (300 rental units) and hotel (149 rooms) tower in Chinatown.

    The developer is Paris-based Compagnie de Phalsbourg and the hotel component is expected to be operated by the European brand, MOB Hotel.

    Above is the only rendering I could find. If you would like to read a bit more about the project, check out Curbed LA.

    Image: Studio Gang

  • 11 Hoyt, Brooklyn

    Tishman Speyer just unveiled a new condo project in Brooklyn called 11 Hoyt. And it just so happens to be Studio Gang’s first residential project in New York City. Preview above. More renderings over here.

    It’s a 51 storey condominium with 480 residences and 55,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor amenities. The unit mix ranges from studios to four-bedroom residences, and prices range from $600,000 to over $4 million (USDs, of course).

    If you’re from Toronto, you’re probably looking at the renderings and thinking to yourself: “There are no balconies or outdoor spaces.” But that’s fairly typical in the NYC market, as I understand it.

  • Living on water

    Phaidon has a new architectural book out that surveys 55 homes, all of which have some sort of connection to water, whether that be an ocean, lake, river, or pool. It’s called Living on Water. I don’t (yet) have a copy, but it looks like the perfect coffee table book for a cottage, summer home, or studio apartment with zero connection to water. Monocle on Design recently interviewed the editor of the book (podcast episode here). So if beautiful homes on the water are your thing, maybe check it, and the book, out.

  • Two new chiefs

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    There were some big announcements in the planning world this past week here in the Greater Toronto Area. Gregg Lintern (follow him on Twitter) was named the new chief planner of Toronto (he was previously the acting chief planner following Jennifer Keesmaat’s departure) and Andrew Whittemore (couldn’t find him on Twitter) was named the new chief planner of Mississauga.

    As I went through the articles announcing the above appointments, I couldn’t help but be reminded that this region is at an exciting and pivotal moment in its history. All of the talk is about improving urban mobility (i.e. becoming less dependent on cars); intensifying around transit stations (as well as gently intensifying neighborhoods); making downtown a better place for families; and so on.

    It can be easy to feel defeated in this big bad world of city making. Oftentimes things seem to get reduced to either urban vs. suburban rhetoric or, as if nothing else matters, this one simple question: “But, how tall is the building?” So its nice to know that those at the helm continue to see endless opportunity in this region. I know that I wouldn’t want to be doing what I’m doing anywhere else.

    Photo by mwangi gatheca on Unsplash

  • What are the most important condo and rental building amenities?

    Last night I casually asked the

    Twittersphere

    what the most important condo amenity is, besides a gym. 

    That tweet got quite a few responses – everything from rock climbing to a proper facility for realtor lock boxes.

    Given the response, I thought it would be worthwhile to be a bit more rigorous in this analysis. So I have created an online survey that you can very quickly fill out by clicking here. 

    Here’s how this is going to work:

    – You have to enter your email address. Sorry, some friction. I figured that would make the data a bit more reliable. Don’t worry your email is safe.

    – You can select a maximum of 3 amenities. One of them can be “Other”, in which case you would then enter in an amenity not already found on the list.

    – The order of the amenities in the survey is being randomized so as to avoid any possible it’s-near-the-top-and-I’m-too-lazy-to-scroll bias.

    – You’ll be able to see the results of the survey after you’ve responded. I’ll also post the results to this blog so that it’s public and people learn things. Individual emails will, of course, never be published.

    Developers should be building what people actually want and will use. Now is your chance to tell us what that is. Click here for the survey.

  • It Will Never Work

    On March 31, RIBA North (Royal Institute of British Architects North) in Liverpool will be opening the doors on a new exhibition that explores 25 years of award winning work by the developer and self-described “regenerator”, Urban Splash. I love the name of the exhibition. It’s called: “It Will Never Work.”

    Here is a short description of the exhibition:

    Urban Splash profess to have started without a plan, purposefully ignoring advice and routinely rejecting accepted development processes. At every step ‘it will never work’ has been a call to action rather than a discouragement.

    The company’s maverick presence on the development landscape of the North has changed the way we live, work and play in our cities, and their continued success as ‘established innovators’ is helping to shape urban futures.

    If you aren’t familiar with the work of Urban Splash, I would encourage you to check them out. When I was first starting out in development and scouring the world for developers that actually cared about design and cities, these guys were on my shortlist.

    So I have been a longtime follower and I have developer friends here in Toronto who I know also admire their work. Sadly, I have no plans to be in Liverpool anytime soon. But maybe some of you do.

  • UNStudio announces new tech architecture company (and thoughts on the smart home)

    Dutch architecture firm UNStudio has just launched a new company called UNSense, whose purpose is to explore and develop “new sensor-based technologies that are specifically designed to positively impact people’s physical, mental and social health.” They are calling the new business an “arch tech company” and it is their belief that, at some point, all architecture firms will become arch tech companies. You can learn more about UNSense, here.

    This announcement got me thinking about the state of smart home technologies, which, of course, is this massive buzzword that everyone is throwing around these days. Many of us have smart thermostats, voice assistants (that may be listening to our every word), wifi lights, and so on. And you can do some pretty neat things with software like IFTT, such as program your lights to come on at sunset or when you walk in the door.

    But as cool as they may be, these smart home devices have always felt like patchwork add-ons to me. I understand that this is partially driven by what customers can easily adopt and I don’t mean to discredit the value that they bring, but today’s post is about reminding us to also think more fundamentally, as opposed to just incrementally.

    Smart thermostats, for instance, give us the functionality to adjust our heating/cooling from our phone. But at the end of the day, they still control the same underlying system, which, by the way, is a fairly simple one. When it gets cold (because of our R-3 windows), the heat turns on. When it gets warm enough, the heat turns off. Zoned systems certainly add another layer of sophistication, but are we optimizing for the right variables?

    UNSense works at three scales: Cities, Buildings, and Interiors. And if you look at what they are trying to do at the building scale, it is around the interface between inside and out. Designing transformable facade systems and buildings that can respond to their environment and our changing needs. These are not new ideas, but in today’s tech-driven world, the timing may just be right.

    If you think about the climate we have here in Toronto, it is actually an incredibly difficult design problem. We have cold winters and hot humid summers, which means we have to solve for two different extremes. Mechanical systems have made that a lot easier to do, but if we’re going to meet the energy and greenhouse gas emission targets that we’re all talking about, we’re going to need a hell of a lot more than just smart thermostats.

    Image: UNSense

  • Hmm…architecture and basic income

    Albert Wenger recently published a post on his blog about architecture and basic income. Albert is a venture capitalist and is currently working on a book called World After Capital, which I have mentioned before on this blog. He is also an advocate of basic income as a solution to the growing inequality that the modern economy seems to be producing.

    In this latest post he wades into the world of architecture with two assertions that I would like to respond to today. The first is that with basic income the current trend of everyone piling up in large cities will end. We will decentralize in search of cheaper land on the outskirts of cities. And the second is that affordable housing could perhaps be produced with a more open source approach to architectural drawings and new construction.

    In terms of his first point, I’m not entirely clear why someone earning a basic income would suddenly decentralize. In the comments there is some discussion about how retirees, on a fixed income, often move outward in search of more affordable housing. I understand that phenomenon, but I am not convinced in this scenario. 

    There has been lots of talk about the demise of cities because of new technologies and other factors. But agglomeration economies have proved, again and again, to be a powerful centralizing force. Let’s also not forget about the environmental impacts of large scale decentralization, which would only be partially mitigated by the widespread adoption of electric vehicles. 

    Secondly, you can build a house without an architect. The issue isn’t that good bathroom details are hard to come by. Some of the bigger issues are likely the availability of land (decentralization, I guess, is supposed to solve this); construction costs (it’s a highly inefficient process that generates copious amounts of waste); and the immense regulatory burdens imposed on new construction (process, time, and costs).

    All of this stemmed from a visit that Albert did with a group of architecture students who are researching the relationship between architecture and basic income. I would be very curious to see what they produce.

    What are your thoughts?

    Photo by Mathyas Kurmann on Unsplash