Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 317

Search for the most iconic chair designs in the world and you'll likely come across a list that includes :

• Wassily Chair by Marcel Breuer (1928)

• Barcelona Chair by Mies van der Rohe (1929)

• Grand Consort by Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier, and Pierre Jeanneret (1928)

• The various Eames Chairs (starting in 1945)

• Wishbone Chair by Hans Wegner (1949)

• Wiggles Side Chair by Frank Gehry (1972)

• And the list goes on.

Most of these chairs also look as if they were just designed yesterday. Meaning, they're timeless and have stood the test of time. But they are mostly old er designs. Which raises an interesting question: How much does the passage of time play in a role in determining whether or not something is "iconic"?

There are some more recent designs that you could call iconic. The Roly-Poly Chair by Faye Toogood (2014) and the Louis Ghost Chair by Philippe Stark (2002) come to mind. This suggests that really great designs can become immediate classics. (Though, this latter example is a reinterpretation of a classic French chair that in and of itself is an icon.)

What I think is the mostly right answer is that, yeah, sometimes you can catch lighting in a bottle. The Louis Ghost Chair, for instance, is one of the top selling chairs of the 21st century. It's a clever and modern take that used new technologies (as is often the case) to revisit an old classic. Starck nailed it.

But more often than not, you probably need time. Time is what allows the object to form cultural associations in our mind and to prove that it is, in fact, timeless. However, if this is truly the case, then it makes it difficult to determine if we're still producing as many design icons today as we did in the past. We won't really know until they become old.

Image: Louis Ghost Chair via Knoll

The past week has felt more like a London winter, than a Toronto one. It has been mild, rainy, and gray. So right now feels like an opportune time to write about this solar-powered light/art piece called Sunne. Created by Marjan van Aubel, the light has been designed to hang right in front of a window using two simple cables. There's no need for an external power source, because it has an integrated battery that harvests sun during the day. The light then automatically turns on at sunset, and has the ability to simulate some pretty stunning sun experiences .

Now, if you happen to live in a place with a roof that gets good sun exposure, I suppose you could just install a bunch of solar panels and use them to generate power for cool-looking things in your home. But if you don't have the ability to do that -- for instance, maybe you live in a multi-family building -- then this feels like a clever and extremely beautiful way to harvest some amount of sun. I'm sure that, eventually, we'll have building facades that can generate a meaningful amount of solar power, but until then, you've got devices like Sunne.

P.S. For what it's worth, I'll take cold, snowy and sunny , over mild, rainy and gray , any day of the week.

Image: Sunne

Many years ago I was in a community meeting talking about a proposal we had to add retail uses adjacent to a park. Residential was the highest and best use, but we were excited by what retail could do for the project and area. We were imagining something like a Parisian cafe where everyone would sit facing outward toward the park.

Much to our surprise, the community was vehemently opposed. And when we eventually asked who had been to Europe and sat outside in a nice cafe, the response we generally got was, "yeah, we have, and it's obviously nice there, when on vacation. But that's Europe. It won't work here and it's not appropriate for the area."

Hmm. This raises all sorts of interesting questions. But for today, let's ask this one here: Why is it that some people choose to live in places that are so different than the ones they visit when on vacation?

Is it because we, as humans, want fundamentally different experiences when we travel? i.e. We want to escape from our current reality. "Oh look how novel this is." In this case, I guess you could say that our markets are fairly efficient and people are getting the kind of lifestyles that they truly want, both at home and abroad.

Or, is it because, for a variety of reasons, we've created rules and obstacles that force certain built form outcomes? We think the other ways won't work. I often find myself in this latter camp, meaning that when I travel, I at some point end up thinking: "This is a good idea. I want to both move here immediately, and steal this idea and bring it back to Toronto."

How about you?

Photo by  DAT VO  on  Unsplash