50-52 Weber St W & 107 Young St | 6 fl | Proposed

[ac3r]

Now I've been at KPMB for a while, so feel free to look at some of the recent work that has been done. Since you're not a client of mine, you don't need to see my personal portfolio.

I quite like how the Canary Block Condos manages to make a mid-rise condo building interesting yet not an overly busy design. Are the balcony railings actually 3D or is it just the use of colour to provide that effect? Looking at the top floor, it looks like they are actually three-dimensional ...

Yeah, they are. It's a one trick architectural designers can use to make an otherwise modest building look more visually interesting. Pioneers like Alvaro Siza and Zaha Hadid really popularized playing with geometry like this. It's a good example of phenomenological architecture, which emphasizes the subjective experience of architecture for each individual, playing on things like geometry, lighting, shape, sound and space. Unlike the more prestigious buildings they do, condos tend to lack budgets to go extremely elaborate, so one way you can make an otherwise fairly simple structure and make it interesting is to simply play with the facade. In this case you can use the balconies. A similar example in Toronto are the really tall Harbour Front Condos. The Pier 27 Tower is another unique one, because it actually results in more balcony space for condo owners which you can see here. Simple, but effective. 345 King Street in Kitchener offers a bit of a modest example of this locally.

Attached is a photo of Canary Block, where you can see the effect of the 3D. You can see it's a result of the balconies being angled horizontally, while being straight vertically. The use of 2 different colours of metal makes the straight vertical part look like it's sticking in and out in addition to the zig zag of the horizontal sections.