Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1231

Every now and then I’ll come across a website, a product, or something that immediately resonates with me. Usually that means I’ll immediately subscribe to it, buy it, follow it, or do whatever the action is supposed to be. It doesn’t happen all that often – though I think it should be a goal of companies and organizations to delight – but that’s exactly what happened to me this morning when I stumbled upon Subtraction.com.

Subtraction is a blog about design, technology and culture (all things I love) and it’s written by  Khoi Vinh . Khoi is Principal Designer at Adobe. Prior to this, he was Design Director of The New York Times and co-founder of the design studio Behavior, LLC. Fast Company also named him one of the 50 most influential designers in America . But enough of all that. His blog is great.

Whenever I write about blogging , I tend to get questions about other blogs I might recommend. So today I’m recommending Subtraction.com. I’ve also added it to my working reading list , which I don’t think many of you are aware of because you probably just read this blog in your inbox. But it exists and I’m happy to add to it if you have interesting suggestions. (Please leave a comment below.)

P.S. Because of Subtraction, I now have the movie High-Rise on my watch list. Have any of you seen it? Because I don’t have cable or Netflix, I tend to be painfully out of the loop on these sorts of things. It’s based on a book by J.G. Ballard and it’s the story of a 1970s suburban London apartment building that starts to socially degrade. How could I not want to watch that?

The Detroit Free Press recently published a summary of some of the new rental apartments coming online in and around downtown Detroit. Here’s the map that they published along with their piece:

Based on this article, demand is outstripping new supply and rents are starting to push above $2 per square foot. This strikes me as a solid number given that there are also for sale lots/houses in the city going for $10,000.

Going back to some of the posts I have written about rental apartment development in Toronto, you might remember that $3 psf is roughly our magic number given current cost structures.

In some special circumstances you might be able to get a project off the ground with rents closer to $2 psf, but that’s an exception to the rule. There are many areas in the Toronto region with $2 psf rents and few, if any, new rental apartments.

But Detroit is obviously a different city, as is every real estate market.

Land would be cheaper. Many of these new rental apartments are conversions of existing buildings (which were probably bought for cents on the dollar). And I wouldn’t be surprised if there are tax abatements and other incentives to encourage more development. 

I also wonder if people in the city aren’t being at least partially drawn to multi-family buildings because of the safety and security benefits. That’s something that certainly came up when I was in Detroit last weekend.

Regardless, this is a good news story for Detroit, which is not always the story you hear people telling of the city.

Dutch architecture firm MVRDV recently converted an old industrial building in Hong Kong into new office space. The overall project size is roughly 200,000 sf. What’s unique about the project is the obsessive focus on transparency and glass.

Here’s what the interior looks like:

And here’s how the architect has described the project:

“We are moving into a transparent society, businesses are becoming more open with the public, and people care more about what goes on behind closed doors. In that way, a clear workspace leaves nothing questionable, nothing hidden; it generates trust.” Tells MVRDV co-founder Winy Maas, “But also it is an opportunity for the building to become a reminder of the industrial history of the neighbourhood, monumentalised in a casing of glass.”

I have written quite a bit about how I believe we are shifting towards a more transparent world – perhaps even a radically transparent world. And so it’s interesting to see an architect pick up on this broader theme and translate it into physical space.

The floor is transparent. The partitions are transparent. The furniture is transparent. And you can clearly discern the interfaces between old and new.

Good architecture, at least in my opinion, should reflect what is happening in our broader society. That’s why I believe that studying the history of art and architecture is really like studying the history of the world.

For more photos of the project, click here .

Image by Ossip van Duivenbode via MVRDV