Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 746

In Toronto we have a street named Avenue Road. If you're learning about this for the first time, you might be wondering: "Well, is it an avenue or is it a road?" Then again, does that sort of distinction even matter? Does it imply certain characteristics? When I think of an avenue, I think of a broad and straight tree-lined street. And indeed, Avenue Road is connected to a street called University Avenue, which is pretty straight, broad, and has trees lining it. It's a ceremonial kind of street that leads you toward the Ontario Legislative Building. It fits my definition. And so maybe Avenue Road is really saying, "Yeah, I know I'm not an avenue in the traditional sense, but I eventually connect into one and so I have decided to use both names."

It could also be the case that we haven't always been that meticulous when naming our roads. Or perhaps we simply changed the way we designed and thought about our streets as we sprawled outward, and along with that came some name changes. In the oldest parts of Toronto, the main streets tend to be exactly that -- streets. And our secondary streets are often named as avenues. This is the opposite of a place like Manhattan, where avenues are the broad north-south streets that take you downtown and uptown, and streets are the smaller east-west roads that take you across the narrower part of the island. Here there is a very clear logic. Avenues are big. Streets are small.

https://twitter.com/puntofisso/status/1213135545121099777?s=20

Looking at this road name map of London by Giuseppe Sollazzo ( click here if you can't see it above), it's obvious that London's street network is pretty much the opposite of New York's rational street grid. But you can see what appears to be a clear graduation from streets (in the center) to roads and then to some sort of melange that seems to include a bunch more avenues. They may just be street names, but they to speak to a whole host of things, including the evolution of our cities, changing attitudes toward city planning, and naturally the adoption of new kinds of mobility. They also make for nerdy maps.

Just look at these deep cantilevered balconies and this board-formed concrete. Let's also not forget the fine-grain retail and small mid-block laneway.

Designed by Woods Bagot for Komplete Construction , the "Short Lane" project was completed in the Surry Hills neighborhood of Sydney in 2018. It has 22 suites -- each with both north and south exposure -- and is about 1,900 square meters in total. So the average suite size looks to be somewhere in the range of 80 square meters.

Here's a peak inside:

And here are those cantilevered balconies again:

I have no idea what the entitlement process is in Sydney for a project like this. If you do, please share it in the comments below. But this is undoubtedly an attractive scale and type of infill housing, something that I think should be encouraged and allowed as-of-right. No multi-year rezoning process. No complicated site plan process. Just cool infill housing.

Photos: Woods Bagot

The submission documents for 1200 Bay Street -- the supertall being designed by Herzog & de Meuron and Quadrangle Architects -- are now publicly available through the City of Toronto's development applications website. I went through the plans today out of curiosity. Below are the typical residential floors. The three tranches shown here are floors 19-46, 48-79, and 81-84. Note the side elevator core and the east-west shear walls -- both of which I was expecting to see.

And here are some of the main project stats:

• Site area after laneway widening: 890.1 square meters

• Total gross floor area (residential & non-residential): 54, 898 square meters

• Floor space index: 61.67

• Building height (excluding mechanical penthouse): 324 meters

• Number of residential suites: 332

• Vehicular parking spaces proposed: 0

• Bicycle parking spaces proposed: 673

As a rule and out of professional courtesy, I do not comment on other people's projects on this blog (other than to occasionally point out awesome and ambitious projects). But I do enjoy going through drawing sets to see what others are doing and to see what I might learn. And I am similarly happy to collaborate with others who may want to learn from what we are doing.

If you'd like to download a copy of the submission package, you can do that by entering the address over here .