Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 615

Building things, as we all know, is a risky endeavor. I think of myself as an optimist, but the reality is that there are countless things that can go wrong. There's approvals risk, political risk, market risk, construction risk, design risk, and many other kinds of risk, some/many of which will be entirely unforeseen. If you asked me two years ago, I wouldn't have listed pandemic risk as being all that high up on the list.

So one way to think about the process of building/developing is that it is an exercise in risk mitigation. This makes it sound a lot less sexy than "city building." Given this, there can be a natural and understandable tendency to want to repeat what worked the last time around. Why make a change and introduce more risk into the system if you don't have to, right? This is arguably one of the reasons why it is often said that the real state industry isn't all that innovative. Too busy managing risk.

To give a specific example, let’s say you’re really focused on managing design risk. In this case, you might make the decision to always work with the same architect. This way you can establish a set of typical approaches and a standard spec. You know how to work together and you know what you're getting when it comes to working drawings. Rinse and repeat as best you can.

There is also something to be said about a kind of product-driven or branded approach to development. In this case you want some consistency to help build a specific brand and experience. And just because you’re using the same firm, doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t innovate and be design forward. This is what great architects do. Think Foster + Partners and Apple. Their stores are powerful brand symbols but also wonderful and highly site specific.

An alternative approach might be to continually use different (design) architects. And maybe partnering with an array of celebrated firms is part of your brand story. You introduce a certain degree of design risk because you’re now trying out and building new relationships, but you could perhaps argue that you’re mitigating other risks. Does using a brand name architect help to reduce market risk, for example? In some markets, it’s almost essential.

I don’t think there’s a right or wrong approach here. Use the same firm, or don’t. Use international starchitects, or don’t. The point is simply that development is fraught with risks that need to be managed. Design is one of many. How you choose to do that depends on what you’re trying to do and what you’re after.

This past spring a new restaurant called Ooki Pavillon opened in the Sihlfeld neighborhood of Zurich. It's an izakaya-style Japanese restaurant that is housed in a seven-sided pavilion that was initially constructed in the 1950s. The place looks great (see above), but what you may also find interesting is that the pavilion was initially built as an amenity space (leisure room) for one of Zurich's first high-rise apartment blocks. Check it on street view, here . Supposedly there are only a handful of these sorts of pavilions remaining in the city. And so it is nice to see this one get repurposed (I don't know what it was prior to Ooki). It is also a good reminder that, while many of our post-war apartment blocks aren't the most urban in their approach, rethinking the ground plane can go a long way.

Images: Ooki Pavillon

This is an interesting chart from the New York Times showing the breakdown of (real estate) uses across the largest downtowns/CBDs in the US. It was put together using satellite data and data from CoStar, including their boundary definitions for each downtown/CBD. The point of the chart is to show that some US downtowns are heavily dominated by office square footage. But if you look a bit closer, there are other interesting takeaways. Look at retail in Honolulu, hotels in Austin, and how much residential many US cities have in their CBDs.