Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 265

Studio Libeskind has a recently completed project in Brooklyn that looks like it was designed by Studio Libeskind. It has angled facades and, judging by the comments on Dezeen , its design is polarizing. But it is an affordable housing project for seniors, and it does have a large atrium in the middle of it.

Atria are a bit of a unique feature in multi-family housing (at least in this part of the world). For better or for worse, the gold standard has become the double-loaded corridor. And that's because it's "efficient." It helps you maximize the amount of rentable or saleable area to gross construction area.

Here in Toronto, a typical efficiency -- calculated as the net saleable/rentable area divided by the gross construction area -- would be somewhere between 75-80%. Though many factors can affect this percentage, such as the amount of amenity space in the building.

There is certainly the option of just building a less efficient building, but then it means you'll likely need to increase the price of the homes to compensate for this loss in efficiency.

This is the trade-off that is often made with smaller suites. More and smaller suites usually translate into more corridor space (i.e. a lower overall efficiency). But it may make sense to do this if you think your smaller suites will generate more revenue on a per square foot basis.

Off the top of my head, I can only think of two residential building in Toronto with an atrium. And that's 71 Front Street East in the St. Lawrence and "The Atrium" at 650 Queens Quay West. The latter is pretty neat inside. The last time I checked, it even had fake palms.

In the case of both The Atrium and Libeskind's Brooklyn project, the atria result in single-loaded corridors. (I'm not sure how 71 Front was designed.) Here's what Libeskind's project looks like:

The obvious advantage of this condition is that you get natural light into the corridors, whereas with a typical double-loaded corridor you don't. But again, the disadvantage of this design is that you only have apartments on one side, instead of both sides.

In this case, the thermal envelope of the building is the outside face of each corridor (atrium side). This means the corridors are interior or conditioned spaces.

Another option would be to create open-air corridors, like in this example from Montreal . This creates corridors exposed to the elements, but now you've reduced your overall energy consumption (less space to heat/cool) and you've created the possibility of double-aspect units.

Personally, I'm a fan of atria and courtyards in residential buildings. But for the reasons we just talked about, they're not that common. My sense is that they're far more common in commercial buildings. John Portman , for instance, made a name for himself designing and developing hotels around them.

What are your thoughts, though? Would you pay a premium to live in a residential building with a nice atrium? I bet some of you would if it meant an improved suite design, such as more windows and more natural light.

Photos: Hufton + Crow

One of the important things that I remember them drilling into our heads in business school was about how to write a business memo. This might not seem like a big deal, but it is. Emails, decks, and recommendations are ubiquitous in business.

I remember three main points.

One, use clear and concise writing. If you can use fewer words, do that. Two, be decisive. In fact, they used to tell us that being decisively wrong was always better than being vaguely correct . And three, be as quantitative as possible.

If you can replace words with numbers, you should do that. For example, instead of saying that something recently increased significantly, it is far more effective to say that something increased by 27% over the last 18 days.

I was reminded of this earlier today when I came across this:

Supposedly, it is what Amazon used to tell its employees back in 2018. I don't know the source, but the tips sound right and make sense. Be concise. Use data. Eliminate weasel words. And make sure you're communicating a "what". In other words, be decisive.

I spent three years living in Philadelphia for grad school and one of the things that I appreciated the most was its walkability. I walked and took transit everywhere. Much of this has to do with the grid system that was laid out for the city in the 17th century . But there are also lots of more recent developments that help to reinforce this fabric.

CityLab, for example, just published this article on Penn's Landing Square , which is a housing complex in Philadelphia's Society Hill neighborhood. Built in 1970 and designed by Canadian-American architect Louis Sauer , the modernist complex occupies an entire 2.37-acre block and contains an assortment of 118 low-rise homes, many of which are connected through small interior laneways.

Here's the site plan :

In addition to its handsome architecture, what is noteworthy about Penn's Landing Square is that its site plan makes it quite a dense low-rise development. At 118 homes, this translates into just under 50 units per acre. CityLab estimates that this means the development holds about 174 people per acre (~412 people total), which would make it more dense than Stuyvesant Town in New York ( ~158 persons per acre ).

However, this is based on the assumption that there are almost 3.5 people living in each of these homes. While generally large, I don't know if this is the case. It would be higher than the average US household size. But regardless, from a unit per acre standpoint, it remains a great example of dense, family-oriented, and grade-related housing.

For fun, let's compare this to a more intense form of infill development. Our Junction House project, for instance, contains 151 homes and sits on a 0.48-acre piece of land. This translates into about 315 units per acre. I don't know off hand the average number of occupants per household, but I reckon that, given our larger average suite size, we should be on the higher end compared to most mid-rise condominiums. So I would say that we are probably 400+ people per acre.

It's unfair to compare a single development to an entire neighborhood, such as Stuyvesant Town. Circulation and other open spaces will necessarily pull down your average density. But these individual development examples do speak for themselves. There are many parts of North America where you might find 1 home or a handful of homes per acre of land. At Penn's Landing Square, this number is 50 units per acre. And at Junction House, it's 315 units per acre.