General Urban Waterloo Updates and Rumours

[tomh009]

And this one is on Union St E as well, although I can't remember the number, nor can I find it in Waterloo's building permit database. Design and development by NEO.

   

[ac3r]

NEO...you can always rely on them to LARP as real architectural designers lmfao. I wonder how much money they charged to put a box on a slightly smaller box?

[cherrypark]

Boring design and completely agnostic to its context. I will never reconcile the thinking of doing this kind of look on a street filled with the KW vernacular style. Doesn't have to be a revival but what is this grey box trying to communicate, really.

[ac3r]

Even going against the context of the existing surroundings in a tasteful manner isn't hard - or bad to do. Here are just 3 random examples of houses in Switzerland that fall within what one would call "contemporary architecture" but still fit into the environment they are in.

The first is a house that shows how you can easily align with the existing, prevalent architectural shape of what is already in an area. The second is an even better example of this. Whilst not my favourite (it's nice inside, though) this home perfectly fits into the neighbourhood but also demonstrates that it was built recently. The last shows how you can indeed do something that - at least on paper - would not fit at all into its surrounding environment, but due to the simple elegance of its materials and design choices, does so whilst also standing out, but not in a way that makes it seem pretentious.

This NEO home is just blah. The materials are obviously cheap and the entire design was surely done in half a workday. It's just 2 boxes. And a couple of windows. Also the garage is much smaller than they show on the render...lol I hope the people who commissioned this don't feel cheated for not getting an extra wide garage and discount EIFS. It also ended up grey instead of white. The windows are slightly different as well. I guess I don't expect much considering it's NEO but they really put zero effort into this.

[tomh009]

Looks like it'll be a white box. But I'm actually more interested in knowing whether it's a SFH or a something-plex.

[ac3r]

Likely just a house. NEO Development seems to mostly take on small architectural jobs for individual home owners (mostly new builds, from what I understand). They are the same as but also distinct from NEO Architecture.

[ijmorlan]

I hope those Swiss examples have the weather proofing between roof and wall figured out. My parent’s cottage had no overhang like that and they had problems with water getting in until they extended the roof to create an overhang. But the cottage was old and in other ways not originally built properly; maybe those newer houses have it figured out.

[ac3r]

The architectural standards in regards to both engineering and design are superb in Switzerland, so I'm sure they're fine.