Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 912

Liz Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro was recently asked by designboom  about how her firm approached the design of Fifteen Hudson Yards (the first residential tower in New York’s Hudson Yards).

The firm had never designed a high-rise before. So while their typical approach would be to analyze program, here they were heavily informed by the views – both in and out from the site – as you move up the tower.

The 88 storey tower transitions between two footprints. The base matches the street grid of the city, but as you move up the tower it transforms into a cloverleaf – allowing panoramic views of the city.

It is a somewhat similar approach to what has been proposed by Studio Gang for One Delisle . Except for the transformation here is to a multifaceted cylindrical shape (a  hexadecagon  is what has been drawn).

From the late 19th century when Chicago began to pioneer the modern skyscraper, architects and engineers have been thinking about how you treat a tall building as you move from top to bottom.

Chicago architect Louis Sullivan responded to this challenge with his tripartite approach to design. He believed that tall buildings should be characterized by three main divisions: a base (bottom), a shaft (middle), and a cap (top).

The technological innovation that allowed this thinking to flourish was the non-load-bearing curtain wall. Once the exterior walls of a tower no longer supported the actual building, architects then had the freedom to really experiment.

This remains true to this day, but we no longer need to confine ourselves to only three parts. New technologies now allow for more.

Today we have parametric modeling  and other design tools that allow us to create new geometries and transitions; forms that would have been pretty complex to draw up in the past. 

In the case of Fifteen Hudson Yards, every floor plate from 20 something and up is slightly different. I wonder what Louis would think of this.

Image: Timothy Schenck via designboom

I first met Monika Jaroszonek in 2017, right before she started RATIO.CITY . Since then she has developed some pretty incredible tools for the city building space.

Yesterday the company published this interactive visualization looking at development potential across the City of Toronto. The mapping looks for the following:

• Land that has a Mixed Use, Apartment or Regeneration designation in the City of Toronto’s Official Plan
  

• Land that is located within a Provincially designated Urban Growth Centre
  

• Land that is located within 500m of a Major Transit Station
  

The tool then ranks each development site – AAA, AA, A – according to how many of the above criteria it meets.

It also flags land that it refers to as “Missed Opportunity.” These are lands located within 500m of a Major Transit Station, but that are designated as Neighbourhoods (considered stable) or Employment (whole other discussion).

Based on this filter, about 5.6% of the City’s land is a “Missed Opportunity” and about 1.2% is AAA.

When you look at the visualization, that is one of the first things you will probably notice; a lot of our transit infrastructure is currently underutilized as a result of land use policies.

Image: RATIO.CITY

“Like so many sports that humans do,” he [Kari Medig] says, “skiing can seem absurd: sliding over the miracle of frozen water, slipping down steep mountains wearing layers of crazy clothes—it really is a strange thing to do.”

I love skiing (well snowboarding to be exact). And I love photography. So here is an interesting photo essay from FvF about “the unexpected diversity of the ski community.” It features the work of Canadian photographer Kari Medig .

Kari’s career is centered around photographing unusual ski-spots around the world. He has discovered that every locale has its own unique subculture. In some places, skiing is about status. But in other places, people depend on it for their livelihood.

Eventually Kari hopes to turn this lifelong ski project into a book. I sure hope he does that. I bet it would do very well on Kickstarter. (On a largely unrelated note, his photos of Rio de Janeiro are at least 100x better than mine.)

Image: Kari Medig