Camera: Fujifilm X-T3 (23mm lens)
Tag: construction
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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.
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Please sire, may I give you free land?
This is an aerial photo of the construction site at One Delisle:
Currently, we are on hold and waiting to pour a number of columns on the ground floor because the city has not yet issued our above-grade building permit. And the reason the city has not issued our above-grade building permit is because we have not yet conveyed our parkland dedication land to the city. Frustratingly though, we have been ready to convey this land for over a year! We simply need the city to allow us to give them this free land. To date, we have meticulously documented at least 3-pages of follow-ups and back-and-forth emails as we try our best to do this.
I’ve been doing this long enough that this isn’t surprising or unusual. But it remains deeply maddening. Younger people on the team can’t believe that this is par for the course. On top of this, the city continues to charge interest on the fees that are payable upon issuance of the first above-grade building permit. The result is an insane dynamic where the city can delay things as long as it wants and then charge us, and all other developers, interest on its own delays! I mean, is it any wonder that housing keeps getting more expensive in this city?
During the last mayoral election, some candidates were quick to promise that, if elected, the city itself would start building affordable housing. This, I’m sure, sounded good to most. Toronto needs more affordable homes. But for all of us involved in the building of buildings, it was frankly impossible to imagine. If the city takes this long to accept free land from developers, how could it possibly build anything?
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Framing nearing completion at Parkview Mountain House
The building season is short in Park City. There was still snow on our site in May and there was snow again on our site by October. You can certainly build through the winter, but it’s not ideal. It slows you down, and so the team has been racing to get “closed in” before the real winter weather arrives. (Park City Mountain Resort opens for the season on November 17.)
Right now, it looks like we’ll be finished framing by early next week. We have our framing inspection scheduled with Summit County on Wednesday. Here’s a progress shot of level three from last week:
This is the top floor of the house, which will house the kitchen, dining area, living room, terrace (which is where the above photo was taken from), and two bay windows. The far one is going to serve as a seat in the living room, and the closer one (on the right) is going to be a workspace area. In both cases, they’re designed to orient you towards the trees and the mountain.
Overall, this was Mattaforma’s design strategy — to create a kind of introverted house. The windows facing the street are generally small and placed to frame very specific views of the landscape; whereas the windows facing the trees and mountain are generous. The intent was to always connect you with nature as you move throughout the house.
Sadly, PMH won’t be available for rent this winter. But if you’d like to get on the list for next summer and winter, click here.
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Parkview Mountain House starts construction
I am in Park City for the weekend because we just started site works for Parkview Mountain House (PMH).
When you’re building in the mountains, there are generally two types of sites: sites that are uphill from the road and sites that are downhill from the road.
The latter is significantly harder to build on because you have to first create access to the lot, which means bringing in soil and creating a ramp. You may also end up craning in materials.
Thankfully, our site is on the uphill side. You bring in an excavator, dig into the mountain, and then you have a flat workable site.
That’s what we’re doing on site right now and it’s what you’re seeing above — a big hole in the side of a mountain. And it’s pretty exciting.
Photos: Isaac Silvera
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We’re building an airport!
One of our partners shared this video with me today:
And it is possibly one of the greatest 39 seconds of interview you’ll ever watch.
It is a video of Jim Fahy interviewing James Horan about the construction of Ireland West Airport. The important context is that Horan was a parish priest in Knock, County Mayo, and he desperately wanted an airport so that pilgrims could more easily visit the Knock Shrine.
However, critics felt that an airport in County Mayo was just not feasible. The area was too foggy and too boggy (I had to look this one up).
But Horan successfully campaigned to have one built and he did somehow find the money. Though maybe not the following week. The campaign apparently took a lot out of him, and he died shortly after the airport opened.
But in the end, he got it built.
It takes a special kind of person to accomplish what most people view as boiling the ocean (i.e. an impossible outcome). And when you watch the video, it will become obvious to you that James Horan was that kind of person.
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Buildings are carbon icebergs
Kelly Alvarez Doran shared this article with me on Twitter earlier today. It talks about some of the work that his design studios are doing at the University of Toronto around embodied carbon. More specifically though, his studios are being tasked with figuring out how to halve the carbon emissions generated by new buildings during this decade.
And one of the big findings from his studio is exactly the title of this post: our buildings have become carbon icebergs. Here in Toronto, we tend to build a lot of below-grade parking. We recently got rid of parking minimums (which obviously needed to happen), but the market still demands it in certain areas and for certain projects. So we continue to build it.
What the above section drawings are showing is the percentage of carbon emissions resulting from the below-grade construction component in each project. And as you can see, the numbers are significant, particularly in the case of smaller mid-rise buildings where you don’t have a lot of above-grade area to grow the denominator.
Looking at 2803 Dundas Street West, which is just down the street from our Junction House project, the number is 50%! And sadly, I would guess that our project is probably only marginally better; we’re a bit taller up top, but we also have a raft slab foundation and a watertight below-grade.
This is one of the reasons why I recently tried to make the case for above-grade parking. A big part of my argument was that if we want parking that can be adapted to other uses in the future, and if we want to reduce the embodied carbon in our buildings, then we should be building “unwrapped” above-grade parking. That is, parking which isn’t hidden behind other uses.
But this is often frowned upon in planning circles and it’s not going to be feasible in smaller mid-rise buildings like the ones shown here. We’re also just talking about what is less bad. What we really ought to be doing is trying to build our cities so that people don’t need to rely so heavily on cars to get around.
Image: Ha/f Studio
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Agenda-setting headlines
I am so tired of sensational headlines:
The Ontario Line will zip across the core and up to Eglinton, easing gridlock and alleviating TTC misery. It will also plow through peaceful Toronto neighbourhoods, displacing homes, businesses and everything in its path.
I know exactly what business model it is serving and why it is done, but I’ll ask the question anyway: Why do we need to make everything out to be a problem?
In this case, we’re talking about a new and important piece of city building infrastructure. A subway line that will run through the densest parts of this country and alleviate congestion at key interchanges, as well as broadly across the city.
It is something that we, as a city, have been griping about for many decades. And now, it is finally happening! Will it involve constructing things? Yes. Will it actually displace “everything in its path?” No.
But as we all know, this is the way media works today. They set the agenda (i.e. tell us what we should be terrified and/or pissed off about) and then they sell our attention. And an effective way to do that is to make sure that the headlines get us really worked up.
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Weekend walking tour
I had a friend — who I know from architecture school — visiting from Detroit for the weekend, so we did a little building tour on Sunday morning.
This is the elevated (and half-finished) CIBC Square Park that spans over the rail lines leading into Union Station. The benches are beautiful. On the right side of the second photo are also fire pits that are in the process of being setup.
This is us nerding out (photo credit to Neat B).
And this is the view looking down Bay Street from the stairs that lead up to the park. We tried to snoop around inside a little but a security guard asked us to leave.
This is T3 Bayside — a new timber office building going up on the waterfront. Apparently it is the tallest of its kind in North America at the moment. I am also embarrassed to say that I just learned that T3 stands for timber, transit, and technology, and that it is part of a broader office development strategy that Hines is rolling out.
This is Tridel’s Aquavista. I’m looking forward to the ground floor spaces getting leased up in this area. All of the ingredients seem to be here for a vibrant waterfront community.
This is the next Aqua-something project. We all assumed that there must be strict umbrella rules in place.
This is Monde by Moshe Safdie & BDP Quadrangle (architects) and Great Gulf (developer). It kind of reminds me of 56 Leonard Street (New York) from this elevation. I guess I’m not used to seeing it from the south side.
Finally, this is Sherbourne Common, which is both a park and an important piece of stormwater infrastructure. It treats stormwater before it gets discharged into Lake Ontario and it also helps to reduce poop from flowing into Lake Ontario as a result of combined sewer overflows.
It’s fun being a tourist in your own city. We should all do it more often. It makes you appreciate what you have.
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Looking south toward High Park
What a beautiful day in Toronto. I love the heat.
I took the above photo this morning from the 7th floor of Junction House. It is a view south toward High Park. More specifically though, it is the view from the second and upper floor of what will ultimately become suite 607 (a suite that happens to be still available for sale).
Now that the building is almost topped out, I’m planning to run through a bunch of the suites with my camera and photograph all of the different views. I don’t think I’ve seen something like this done before and I think it could be a pretty cool little photography project.
