Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1286

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Merry Christmas and/or happy whatever you happen to celebrate around this time of year.

Hopefully things have slowed down for you all and you’re relaxing with family and friends either at home or somewhere on vacation. I’ll be doing that here in Toronto and making pancakes for breakfast, because that’s what I like to do on Christmas morning.

If you’re in the market for some long form reading material while you relax, I recommend you check out an article in The Walrus called, After the Troubles . It’s by Toronto-based planner Joe Berridge  – who is a partner at Urban Strategies – and it’s the story behind his team’s Belfast City Centre Regeneration Strategy and Investment Plan .

It’s a fascinating and entertaining read, and there are lots of comparisons between Toronto and Belfast. Here’s a little taste:

“IT WOULD BE HARD to conceive of two cities more different than Belfast and Toronto. One old world, one new; one grand, one utilitarian; one barely ticking over, one growing like topsy. And of course, one tribal, the other the epitome of post-tribe. Belfast is 96 percent white—forget about Catholic-Protestant, that’s the critical urban statistic. And yet it’s important to remember that Toronto itself was once the largest Orange town in the world. (Wikipedia asserts that every mayor of Toronto since its founding was an Orangeman until Nathan Philips , a wonderful Jewish mayor, was elected in 1954.) Even the current mayor, John Tory, draws his name from a bunch of brigands and royalist cattle thieves in the Irish backcountry.”

I spent a bit of time in Belfast when I was working in Dublin (2007) and so it was particularly interesting for me to read about his assessment of the city. Like Berridge, I found the city eerily empty during off-peak times. But it’s an architecturally rich city and a fascinating city for urbanists because of all that has happened .

Though now we are talking about “ after the troubles .” Things are progressing. And that strikes me as a positive thought while I make my pancakes on Christmas morning.

Brutalism is an architectural movement that most people, other than architecture nerds, hate. Derived from the French words for raw concrete – béton brut – Brutalist architecture is characterized by its use of exposed concrete and its imposing fortress-like qualities.

Most people find it too cold, sterile, and impersonal. But this 99% Invisible episode perfectly sums of where I think we sit with this era of building:

“Back in the 1960s, Victorian style buildings were considered hideous and impossible to repair. We were tearing batches of Victorians down to erect big concrete buildings. But some Victorians were saved—and today, some of them are considered treasures.

Concrete architecture now finds itself at an inflection point: too outdated to be modern, too young to be classic. And a small, but growing band of architects, architecture enthusiasts, and preservationists, would like us to just wait a bit and see.

Maybe, with a little time, we’ll come around to love these hulking concrete brutes.”

Concrete can be a wonderful building material all on its own. I mean, just look at the work of Tadao Ando . 

But all concrete is not created equal. Here is a taxonomy of concrete textures that was also part of that same 99% Invisible episode :

I say all this because if we believe that Brutalist architecture has no value then we are likely to believe that it doesn’t need to be preserved. And that may very well be the case for some Brutalist architecture. But if history is any indication, some or much of it may also be considered beautiful one day.

Most cities have a rich history of demolishing (or almost demolishing) buildings and neighborhoods that today we would (or do) treasure. Which tells me that we’re not always very good at figuring out what has value or will have value in the future.

So maybe some of those brutes are worth a second look.

One of the reasons I decided to start blogging was because I saw how open the tech community had become – with respect to sharing their ideas and experiences – and I thought that the same thing could and should be done in real estate, as well as in city building more broadly.

But in many ways, the real estate industry is the antithesis of the tech industry. We are slow moving and secretive of our ideas. Now, some of this is driven by fundamental differences in terms of how these two sectors operate. It’s a lot easier to test and iterate on your ideas in tech than it is with actual bricks-and-mortar. But I still think about ways in which we, in real estate, could be pushing the envelope.

As one example of what I’m talking about, take Union Square Ventures in New York . They call themselves a “thesis-driven venture capital firm”, which means they come up with a framework and core set of ideas, and then use those to drive their investment decisions.

You would think that these frameworks and ideas would be pretty sensitive. I mean, they are the core drivers of their business. But their entire website is actually set up around sharing and collaborating – with the public – on these ideas. Here’s a screenshot:

Each topic is something they are “thinking about” and something they want to make an investment in (or already have). Fascinating.

Many of you, I’m sure, would argue that there are risks to doing this. But there are also benefits, some of which are driven by collective intelligence. By sharing their ideas and hypotheses with the public, it helps to evolve their thinking. After all, their investment thesis is not a static thing. It grows over time.

But in addition to this, it also makes it abundantly clear to their customers (entrepreneurs) what they believe in and what they look for. And I am sure this helps them with deal flow. More and more customers aren’t just “buying” a product, they are also “buying” a philosophical underpinning and belief system.

Can you imagine a real estate firm doing something like this? I can. But it’s not happening yet, as far as I know.