Cross-posted from No Mean City, Alex's personal blog on architecture The architects Atelier Kastelic Buffey are definitely worth watching. I wrote last week for The Globe and Mail about a chalet they designed, at a ski resort near Collingwood, that is minimal and extremely well-detailed - all on a reasonable budget. More pictures after the jump.

Cross-posted from No Mean City, Alex's personal blog on architecture It's out: The new Globe and Mail building will be designed by KPMB, with Marianne McKenna as partner in charge. It will be at the corner of Front and Spadina, on the site of the Toyota dealership in the picture above. See my previous post on No Mean City here. Full details to follow as they emerge.

Cross-posted from No Mean City, Alex's personal blog on architecture This Wednesday (Jan 25), Pina Petricone launches what should be a fascinating new book. The architect and University of Toronto professor leads one of the city's and Canada's best architecture offices - Giannone Petricone - who do creative and successful work from furniture up to whole blocks. With a sense of fun, no less. Petricone edited this new book, a collection of essays that looks at concrete buildings as city-building blocks and ...

Cross-posted from No Mean City, Alex's personal blog on architecture This isn't a "tour" of a completed building but of a proposal: an idea by the Toronto architects Wiliamson Chong to revive a former gravel pit north of Toronto as a hub of sustainable community development. It recently won a Canadian Architect Award of Excellence. Sustainable, community, agriculture - these are all sexy terms (for architecture, I mean), but the depth of this proposal is just as compelling. Starting with a 440-acre site in Haliburton, Ontario, that has been ravaged by gravel extraction, it suggests a series of buildings that would hold greenhouses and a growing assortment of cultural activities related to food. There would be a library and visitor’s centre, gallery spaces, a test kitchen for workshops and culinary conferences, and more.  

Cross-posted from No Mean City, Alex's personal blog on architecture There's an interesting panel discussion coming up on Thursday at U of T's Daniels Faculty of Architecture. Titled Zoning Health, it puts Mirko Zardini, head of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, with U of T professor and architect Brigitte Shim. The very smart new dean of the school, Richard Sommer, moderates. They'll be building on the CCA's current exhibition Imperfect Health, which I haven't ...

Cross-posted from No Mean City, Alex's personal blog on architecture Toronto's housing market may be slowing down, but it’s been incredibly hot for a decade; still, developers haven’t done much to evolve the forms of housing in the city. There are still single-family houses (mostly in the suburbs), high-rise condos (everywhere), and not much in between. This big-and-small dichotomy is in keeping with the development history of Toronto; in the 1960s we went from building houses, almost exclusively, to building high-rise towers across the metro area. (And we’re now seeing how unwise that was.) But other cities find a useful middle ground: walk-up apartment buildings. They are the fabric of most European cities and the best cities in North America. In Boston they take the form of three- and four-storey wood-framed buildings, with reasonably sized apartments. That's where architect and academic Tim Love hails from; head of the architecture/planning office Utile, he's teaching at U of T this year. And he may be helping to generate a new model for Toronto. A few weeks ago he and U of T  profs Ivan Saleff (some of his work, PDF) and Robert Wright wrapped up their studio class on Walk-Up Urbanism. Their students came up with some brilliant and very practical designs for three- and four-storey buildings that would work on Toronto lots and would provide interesting and varied apartments, with decent outdoor space, all at a much lower cost than condos.

Cross-posted from No Mean City, Alex's personal blog on architecture I haven’t touched on the waterfront very often this year (I was busy elsewhere during the discussion of Doug Ford’s Wild Waterfront Kingdom), but a recent interview with Rem Koolhaas raises some interesting ideas about the waterfront and what he calls “assembly-line cities." Koolhaas, the most voluble and brilliant of star architects, recently spoke with the German newspaper Der Spiegel at its new offices on Hamburg’s waterfront. The ...

Cross-posted from No Mean City, Alex's personal blog on architecture Recently I met with an American magazine editor who was in town for a conference, and she was shocked by what she saw. In New York, where she lives and works, the economy is sputtering. Stores sit empty in Midtown Manhattan. Nobody’s building. So the chaos of construction in downtown Toronto came as a big surprise. Because she’s a smart editor, that insight turned into a story - which she asked me to write, for Architectural Record, about what’s bringing all those tall buildings and big design ideas to town.  I was surprised myself when I took stock of what’s going on here and what is coming: 150 more towers now under way. Norman Foster, KPMB and architectsAlliance building on the watefront. $5-million condos next to the Blinds To Go on Davenport. And on and on. (I didn’t even mention the suburban subway line that we are getting, or the Pan Am Games, or, even CityPlace - which any city in North America would love to have right now, with all its faults.) This is an amazingly positive story - especially when you contrast it to the very dark discussions we’re having here about governance, poverty, bubbly real estate, gridlock and infrastructure. (As in John Lorinc’s brilliant piece here.)

Cross-posted from No Mean City, Alex's personal blog on architecture. Recently the Zerofootprint Re-Skinning Awards announced this year's winners - building projects that update older structures and improve their environmental performance, as well as their aesthetics, and set an example for how cities can be greened. It's an interesting prize and it recognizes some very worthy projects that might otherwise go unnoticed. For instance: the Centre for Justice Leadership at Humber College, by Gow Hastings Architects of Toronto. Located at the college's Lakeshore campus in an older suburban neighbourhood, this 18,000-square-foot building is a former car dealership transformed into a facility for police and justice services programs. The big move here is the front facade: a perforated aluminum wall that provides sunshading - partially covering up the building's large showroom windows. The green climbing gardens (or "living wall") also help provide shade. It's a bit of industrial-chic clearly inspired by the work of Southern California architects like Morphosis and Eric Owen Moss, and it fits well here, on a heavily-trafficked, low-density boulevard that feels a bit like Los Angeles.

Cross-posted from No Mean City, Alex's personal blog on architecture. The new architecture critic of the New York Times, Michael Kimmelman, recently focused his attention on a brilliant New York city idea: a program that brings top-quality architects from around the world to work on low-key projects like police stations, firehouses and water treatment plants. Run by the city’s Department of Design and Construction (yes, they’ve centralized the work of developing city sites), it's the Design and Construction Excellence Initiative Initiative. It was introduced by mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2004, and the idea is simple: the city has established a shortlist of architects who deliver high-quality work, pre-qualified them, and decided to go to them first when the city needs design work. Project managers make sure the integrity of the design is preserved. And small projects are kept for small firms, which need the work (and who, in this line of business, are likely to work very hard to create a showpiece).