Showing posts with label Mixed Use Design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mixed Use Design. Show all posts

Tuesday 2 June 2015

Wood Micro Apartments?



Economics dictates that you should build your development with wood framing if the building code lets you - unless a buyer will pay the required extra $100+ per square foot to live in the perceived solidity and safety of concrete construction.

After all, will anyone really care once the plasterboard has been set?

Recent evidence shows that the home buyer in Canada will live in smaller quarters in concrete buildings, but can the current 'micro-sized apartment' movement find opportunity in a wood framed building?

The question is a cultural history one.

In downtown Melbourne, Australia, there is one of the tallest modern timber buildings in the world (10 floors) and no one seemed to mind when the sales began. In Canada, though - a land established on tales of tall timber, it can be a concern.

Evenings toasting marshmallows in front of the campfire may not have helped the timber industry. Is it possible that deep in the Canadian psyche everybody knows: wood burns. More than that - there is a lot of it in British Columbia and like any supply and demand scenario, that makes it seem less valuable.

Add to this the bad press of the leaky mould producing four storey wood frame buildings of the nineties and wood is fighting a huge battle for equality.

In Canada the government has pushed back some, calling for wood to be a major component in any public building. Here, 'Cross Laminated Timber' and 'Laminated Veneer Lumber' known as mass timber construction is doing well to bring solidity to the wood debate.

However, in the developer's world (where the coal mine canary lives), the question for micro-apartments and wood framed buildings remains: "If you build it, will they come?"

The answer may lie in mass timber panels and prefabrication, where computer driven accuracy and fine detail resolution can bring a renewed opportunity to express the beauty of wood.

Monday 22 October 2012

Great Building Design Guide (Part Two: "Maths, Music and Manners")


Like a carpenter's hammer or a brickies trowel, a designer's tools range from mathematics to music. The logic of maths and the structure, layering and rhythms of music are a good analogy for the process of design. Call the steady bass line the structure and press on from that grid...

Local government regulations represent good manners between neighbours, while the building code keeps everyone healthy and safe.

To pull all the issues together into a unified whole takes a concept. Conceptual thinking involves broadly and loosely considering the important parts of any problem and coming up with a unified artistic expression for the building. This is the joy of design.

Discovering a concept for a building gives you an overall vision that helps you make decisions in a structured way further down the track.

next time:  Why go to University?

Tuesday 21 February 2012

The Net of the Crescent Moon


























Competition entry for new city center site in Semiahmoo (which can be translated as 'Crescent Moon'), just outside Vancouver.

The opening in the building follows the path of the setting sun so that we get as much of it as possible. I always enjoy a challenge...fitting a penthouse style apartment plan in this organic plan shape was great fun.

The curved plan surrounds a water feature which becomes a public skating rink in Winter.