Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 975

It’s the dog days of summer right now and I suspect that some of you may be spending your time (or at least some of it) near water. So here is one of my favorite lakeside homes. It is a live/work photography studio sitting on top of a boathouse on Stoney Lake in the Kawartha Lakes region of Ontario. It is by gh3* . They do terrific work.

I love the relationship to the Canadian Shield (see above). And I love how it is a dramatic departure from the archetypal Ontario cottage. I am more impressed by a project like this (it has 1 bedroom) than I am by a 5,000 square foot “cottage estate.”

Some of you may be wondering how a largely all glass curtain wall box performs environmentally during these dog days of summer and I am wondering the exact same thing. But it is north facing. And the goal was to create a space that would enable photos not possible in a conventional studio.

For more on the project, including other photos, go here .

A new exhibition on postwar architecture in (the former) Yugoslavia opens up today (July 15) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’s called,  Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 ,  and it runs until January 13, 2019.

Here is a bit more about the exhibition:

Situated between the capitalist West and the socialist East, Yugoslavia’s architects responded to contradictory demands and influences, developing a postwar architecture both in line with and distinct from the design approaches seen elsewhere in Europe and beyond. The architecture that emerged—from International Style skyscrapers to Brutalist “social condensers”—is a manifestation of the radical diversity, hybridity, and idealism that characterized the Yugoslav state itself.

And here is a panel discussion about the exhibition ( click here if you can’t see the video below):

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2S0bBTHu-8&w=560&h=315]

Architecture tells you a lot about a place and what was happening at the time in which it was built. I would love to see this exhibition and I hope to do exactly that if I’m in New York City before the new year.

Image: MoMA

Yesterday Urbanation released its Q2-2018 rental report for the Greater Toronto Area. It tracks both purpose-built rentals and condominium rentals, the latter being condominium units that are listed for rent on MLS. The average condo rent, for all unit types across the GTA, is up 11.2% year-over-year to a face rent of $2,302 per month.

Here is a chart from the Globe and Mail :

The former City of Toronto, which includes downtown, is actually up 13.5%:

But here are the stats that I really wanted to draw your attention to today ( figures from the Globe ).

According to Urbanation, there were some 384,000 condo apartments in the Greater Toronto Area in 2017 and nearly 1/3 of them were rented out. Given that the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation pegs the total number of rental apartments in the GTA at approximately 311,596, condo apartments represent about 40% of all our rental housing stock.

So condo buildings are actually doing quite a bit of heavy lifting when it comes to providing rental housing in this region.