Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 563

This week the team submitted a rezoning application for the southwest corner of Yonge & St. Clair (1 St. Clair Avenue West).

More of the details can be found over here on Urban Toronto , but so far the response has been overwhelmingly positive . People seem to appreciate the architecture, the public realm improvements, as well as how we're proposing to deal with the embodied carbon in the existing building.

https://twitter.com/alexbozikovic/status/1471557617789059074?s=20

The application proposes to retain the existing 12-storey office building and both expand its floorplates to the west and build new residential on top. In the middle is a shared multi-storey amenity space that also performs some pretty cool structural gymnastics courtesy of Stephenson Engineering (see above rendering).

This approach created some interesting design challenges for the team. Typically when you're adding onto an existing building, you want to do something new and not try and copy/bastardize what's already there. Oftentimes this means something more contemporary.

The architecture team at Gensler Toronto tried this approach but the podium proportions didn't feel quite right when we did it. So a decision was made to instead pay homage to the existing building's architecture, and then kind of reinterpret it by playing with scale and other details.

This way the original building remains architecturally legible, but the entire podium still reads as one and its proportions feel much better. We hope you like it as much as we do.

The cost of container shipping continues to come to the forefront in this current environment. Today I was reviewing prices from a number of our suppliers and the rates for a FEU (forty-foot equivalent container) now seem to range anywhere from $8k to almost $18k (both CAD), depending on the origin.

This is up from a few thousand at the beginning of the year, and from far less prior to that. To help illustrate this point, above is a chart I found over at Statista showing an aggregated global container freight rate index from July 2019 to November 2021. This chart, which is in USDs, suggests that container rates may have peaked and be now tapering off, but who knows really.

This is a challenge for our suppliers and partners to manage through and it is a challenge for us to manage through. In some cases these additional costs will necessarily trickle down to the end consumers of the spaces that we and others are building. But in other cases that is not possible.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CXb-yDcJUeY/

This week it was announced that Nike has acquired RTFKT Studios (pronounced "artifact") for an undisclosed amount. When I read the news (official Nike announcement here ), I immediately thought to myself, "Yeah, of course!"

Some of you may remember that I wrote about RTFKT back in April . They are perhaps best known for their digital sneaker NFTs (on the Ethereum blockchain). And so this is an exceedingly obvious and strategic buy for Nike.

But more importantly, I think this is great validation for the crypto/NFT space and further evidence that our digital and physical worlds are continuing to collide in some new and very interesting ways.

What this ultimately means for life in 10 or 20 years is anybody's guess, but sneakers are the tip of the iceberg. And this doesn't necessarily mean that we're all destined to live in some sort of metaverse video game.

Another way to look at this whole metaverse thing is to consider it not as an actual place or space, but instead as a moment in time (Shaan Puri makes this argument here ). Put differently, the metaverse is simply a point in time where we begin to bestow tremendous value on our digital life and our digital assets.

Instagram is one example of this. Profiles have become integral to people's identifies. We use them to vet restaurants. We use them to vet travel destinations. And we use them to vet potential dating partners, among many other things.

So while sneaker NFTs might be a new thing, there's already lots of evidence that digital goods can have just as much value -- and potentially even more value -- than physical goods. I am sure that Nike recognizes this and it's part of why they bought RTFKT.