Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1376

Towards the end of last year I received a one line email from a reader asking me what I thought about Porter (the airline that operates out of Toronto’s island airport downtown).

I followed suit and responded with one line: “I’m a big fan.” I then pasted a few links to posts I had written where I talked about Porter, the island airport, and why I think they are good for Toronto.

It turns out that was the right answer ;)

Because today I’m excited to announce a fun collaboration between Architect This City and Porter Escapes. This weekend I get to explore Québec City and do something I love to do, which is photograph cities, think about cities, and write about cities. (And eat poutine.)

Here are my travel essentials for the weekend (I wish it was a better photo):

The first thing I should tell you though is that Porter Escapes is different than simply Porter. Porter Escapes is their “packaged vacation” company, so it’s designed for people who want a simple way to book entire getaways (flight, hotel, activities, and so on).

In my case, I’m going to be staying at the Château Laurier . I also have a bunch of activities planned out for Saturday during the day. Stay tuned.

I had initially planned to squeeze in some snowboarding at Le Massif  and try out the nicely branded train that goes from Québec City right to the mountain. But my back and shoulder are still tender from my spill in Banff .

Still, I hope you’ll follow along on Twitter , Instagram , and Snapchat , and using #PorterEscapes . And if you happen to be in Québec City this weekend, let’s grab a pint and poutine.

I’ve also been told that Porter Escapes will be launching a special promotion over the next few days for escapes specifically to Québec City.

Note: I’m supposed to tell you that it’ll be at a price point that you should never expect to see again (i.e. it’ll be a steal).

Happy Friday :)

A controversial design proposal for the tallest building in Europe has been making the rounds online over the past few days. Designed by Morphosis Architects , the 381 meter-tall tower is being proposed in Vals in the Swiss Alps. 

And pretty much everyone seems to hate it.

When I first came across the design, I truthfully had to do a double take to see if it was actually a real proposal. But it seems to be. Everyone is writing about it.

Clearly there are some interesting tensions at play here. You have a hyper-urban building typology in a mountain town setting, but with materials that are intended to make it dematerialize into the landscape.

So I thought we could have a discussion about it in the comments.

Is a small mountain town the right place for the tallest building in Europe? Could it work as a one-off tower?

Image: Morphosis Architects via ArchDaily

Back when the commercial internet first started to take off it was uncommon to use your real name online. Instead people relied on usernames and other pseudynoms to represent themselves. I honestly can’t remember what I used in those days, but I’m sure it was something ridiculous.

Over time though that started to change. 

Blogging started to take off in the late 1990s. And we started to become more comfortable sharing personal information online. Perhaps the biggest shift though, came with the introduction of Facebook in 2004 (over 10 years ago!). All of a sudden people – young college students initially – started sharing lots of personal information online, including photos of themsleves and their friends.

But this wasn’t an overnight change. When Facebook first launched, privacy was an important component. It still is, but I would argue that it has become less central given how public a lot of other social media platforms are today. Twitter, for instance, is what it is today largely because of its publicness. 

For my own social media accounts, I have made every single one of them completely public. From Twitter to Facebook  to Instagram to Snapchat, nothing I post to social media is restricted in any way. And I do that because I believe we are headed towards a world with more – not less – openness, transparency and publicness.

Of course, I’m not just talking about social media and tech. I’m talking about open data in general.

Earlier this year, the Toronto Real Estate Board clamped down on real estate brokers who were publishing historical sales data online . Citing privacy concerns, TREB ordered them to stop or lose their access to the MLS system. 

For those of you not from familiar with the Toronto real estate market, historical sales data for homes is not open and published online. You generally need to go through a realtor to get access to this data. Some think this is the right approach. And others think it is antiquated.

But as I explained above, our conception of what should be private can, and will, evolve over time.

Here are the details on my home:

I purchased it in September 2012 for exactly $400,000 (Canadian). It’s a 650 square foot condo in the St. Lawrence Market neighborhood of Toronto. It has one bedroom, a 400 square foot terrace, one parking spot, and 10′ ceilings.

Sooner or later, I believe this information will be freely available online. But since that’s not the case today, I figured I would just tell you. Sharing this information is not a big deal for me.