Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 631

https://youtu.be/CkZYHSyv-64

This is a really nice kitchen extension. In response to an "oppressively" low ceiling height, the architects -- DGN Studio -- lowered the existing ground floor by about 500mm. At the same time, they created a kind of "concrete tray" that fills the width of the Victorian home's property and extends outward to create a sunken patio space off said kitchen. From the outside, this drop makes the house feel as if it's sitting on a concrete plinth -- hence the name. (A good photo of this can be found here .) It's a simple move, but a good one. Sometimes you just have to play with the section. If you can't see the above video, click here .

I don't think I'm supposed to take any action or feel particularly alarmed after reading about this global mapping of urban subway microorganisms , but it is kind of neat nonetheless. A team of researchers recently spent over 3 years collecting "metagenomic samples" from the transit systems of 60 cities around the world. Everywhere from Stockholm's handrails to Shanghai's subway poles.

The process involved nearly 5,000 samples and the result is this research paper , providing a full atlas of the microbial strains that live throughout our subway systems. Supposedly, none of the findings are anything that we should be worried about though. So carry on riding the subway.

But it is interesting (and very geeky) to note that the researchers discovered something that they are calling a "core urban microbiome." What this means is that they identified 31 different species of bacteria that show up in pretty much all of the cities that they surveyed -- some 97% of their samples.

At the same time, each city, because of things like climate and geography, also has its own microbial profile. In fact, these profiles are so distinctive that the geneticist who lead the study is quoted in the New York Times saying that if you gave him a shoe that was a worn in a particular subway system, he could sequence it and tell you the city with 88% accuracy.

Is this neat or gross?

Photo by Sergey Zolkin on Unsplash

“The city has to be for everybody, not just for the very few.” - Paulo Mendes da Rocha

Brazilian architect, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, died this past weekend. He was 92. Though he hadn't really completed many buildings outside of his home country, his work and his contributions to São Paulo are widely celebrated. Some of his accolades include the Mies van der Rohe Prize for Latin American Architecture (2000), the Pritzker Prize (2006), the Venice Biennale Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement (2016), and the Royal Institute of British Architect's Royal Gold Medal for Architecture (2017). I've always had a soft spot for Brazilian modernism. They were early adopters of European modernism and ultimately made it their own. I don't think Mendes da Rocha would necessarily appreciate this classification, but as I've mentioned here before , modernism, and more particularly brutalism, took on very different qualities in Latin America. Exposed concrete just seems to hit differently in a tropical setting. Here and here are some examples of his more famous projects.

Photo by Leonardo Finotti via Dezeen