Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 621

BILD just announced its finalists for the 2021 BILD Awards .

This is probably the most noteworthy awards program in the development industry here in the Greater Toronto Area. And so I am pretty excited to announce that One Delisle is a finalist for the following awards:

• Project of the Year, Mid/High-Rise (Pinnacle Award)

• People's Choice Award (Voting Opens August 2021)

• Best Suite Design, Large -- West Penthouse Residence

• Best Innovative Suite Design - Sky Collection Suite

The full list can be found over here (PDF). All of the finalists' work is also going to be posted on the BILD Awards website before the end of this week.

The actual winners will be announced this fall at the Awards Gala on October 7, 2021. I'm not sure if it has been decided yet whether it will be in person or online, but we all know that in person would be much better. Let's hope that will be the case.

Given the good news, our office decided that it was probably a good idea to make a few margaritas this evening:

Whatever the end result, we are thrilled to be a finalist.

We are also a past recipient of the "Best Innovative Suite Design" award, which was given to our House Collection of suites at Junction House . So I guess we like working our floor plans.

Congratulations to the full One Delisle team. This is well deserved.

Witold Rybczynski and I clearly do not have the same taste in architecture. But he raises an interesting point about the relationship between architecture and art in this recent post . Here's an excerpt:

In the name of renouncing the past—and denouncing anything that smacks of decoration—modernism has largely done away with art, the lonely Henry Moore stranded on a plaza, notwithstanding. The problem is that when you strip away figural and allegorical ornament, what is left are mute building materials, mechanical-looking details, and abstract space.

There is a long-standing tradition of integrating art, and other ornament, into architecture. But modernism viewed this sort of decoration as being superfluous. It wasn't functionally necessary and so why include it?

This has led us to today where there is a joke that investing in public art means investing in some sort of add-on that sits outside of your building and that can be classified as art. Perhaps something by Henry Moore.

The result, Witold argues, is that we have lost something critically important in our buildings: meaning.

But is allegorical ornament really all that different from a freestanding art piece? Don't both tell a story? And don't they both get applied, in a way, to a building that could surely continue on without it?

At the same time, what is meaningful art? Does it need to include bas-relief and/or figural representations? Or could it be a signed urinal on a pedestal in the lobby with an accompanying digital NFT?

There's no question that buildings need meaning. We all crave stories. But sometimes they communicate in different ways.

Photo by  David Vives  on  Unsplash

https://www.instagram.com/p/CPX05kKAXPb/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Last month a digital-only version of a Gucci bag sold on gaming platform Roblox for about US$4,115 . Again, digital-only. No physical bag that can be brought to brunch. At the time, this was about US$800 more than the real life version of the same Gucci bag. So why not go and buy that one instead?

I am sure that most of you are scratching your head at this and wondering: who the hell is valuing the digital more than the physical? Could it be that status and signaling -- perhaps the real purposes of a designer bag -- are even more important online in the world of Roblox than in real life? In this case, it wasn't even an NFT and so presumably there aren't any value claims around scarcity and authenticity. (Full disclosure: I don't know how Roblox works.)

It's important to keep in mind that meaningful innovation often starts out looking pretty silly to some/most. And to me, this feels like one of those times. What we are clearly seeing is a blurring between our digital and physical worlds. In fact, just today I was reading about a slew of digital-only clothing companies that sell, you know, contactless cyber fashion. One of those companies is Tribute (embedded post above).

The way it works is that you first buy a piece of digital clothing (which can sell out just like regular clothing). You then send them a picture of yourself and the company goes and renders that piece of digital clothing onto your photo. The result is what you see above, which to me looks fairly realistic (though at the same time fantastical, which I think is part of the point).

As out-there as this may seem, this strikes me as something that could become a very big deal. What is real on Instagram anyways? I can also see this being applied to other industries, including real estate. Maybe that is already happening.

What do you think?