Get the bully out of the sandbox
Credit HH Photo
In the current so-called housing "crisis" that is hitting many major cities around the world, it often seems that capitalism is to blame for all those ills. I think this is a short-sighted view that fails to address a few issues:
There are major cities around the world where this is not nearly as much of an issue. Tokyo has found a solution to its housing problem by adopting much-relaxed zoning regulations for housing, that allows for it to go up quickly without red tape.
We have an incentive problem: politicians are elected by city residents. When in a country like Canada, nearly 70% of households own their homes, they have every incentive to fight tooth and nail against increased density, most of the time based on unfounded fears about the negative impact of such developments. Since politicians are cowardly re-election plotting rent-seekers, they tend to not go against the majority in their constituencies, when it comes to make courageous urban planning decisions and allow future residents (who have no say because they don't yet live in the city) a shot at having decent life opportunities. Margaret A., I thought you'd be smarter than that.
We have an urban planning problem: in a city like Toronto, it is absolutely mind-blowing that it is considered normal to have entire neighbourhoods of single-family houses in the downtown core, which were suburban 100+ years ago when they were built, yet do no correspond to the needs of the city anymore.
It's a bit ironic that Canada is founded on the values of acceptance, openness and multi-culturalism and yet, it seems that these principles don't apply at the scale of the block, where it's more like a sandbox to which the local bully won't give you access and cry to his parents that it's unfair he can't play alone anymore when all you want to do is jump him and help him make a sandcastle.
The problem is not the lack of solutions, as we've demonstrated, it's that the culture needs to shift. Maybe if we adopted the "you can't say you can't play" mantra, we might just change that culture.
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Stafford Development projects
We have been working with Stafford Developments to shoot some of their completed projects to showcase on their new upcoming website. Below are some shots that we did for them:
The Rushton Residences, 743 St. Clair W.
530 St. Clair W.
500 St. Clair W.
Film District Towns
Stay tuned for more cool shots to come...
Tips for hiring an architectural photographer #4
This is post 4 of a series of 10, in a series detailing important aspects to hiring an architectural photographer while avoiding the most common pitfalls.
COLLABORATE
Photographing buildings and interiors is not an exact science and it requires collaboration between the photographer and client, in order to achieve the client’s vision. Photographers have a particular way to look at spaces, usually different from the clients'. It is a good idea to use this difference in viewpoints as a sounding board for coming up with ideas that neither you, the client, nor the photographer might have thought of on their own. The pre-production meeting and the scouting shoot are great places to brainstorm and kick-start this process. If you are going to be present on the day of the shoot, use this to you advantage by discussing each view with your photographer and formulating your specific needs in the clearest way possible. Your photographer should be able to show you each shot prior to capturing the image to serve as the basis for discussion.
Yorkville residence, Audax Architecture
Designholmen home and office by Downey Design
We had the pleasure to return to designholmen to complete our shoot.
Living room
In addition to the kitchen and dining room we shot the living room and the master bedroom. The understated elegance of the project, clearly influenced by designholmen's Swedish roots made the shoot a pleasure as there were many angles from which to capture the design, all of them looking really good.
Master Bedroom
We hope you enjoy these images as much as we enjoyed shooting the space.
Goldring student center by Moriyama & Teshima
Main entrance
We recently had the pleasure to shoot the new Goldring student center at Victoria college on the University of Toronto campus. Our assignment was to explore the relationship of this new project to its surroundings and emphasize the contextual importance of all the buildings one can see in this dense urban environment. The student center is surrounded by exceptional buildings such as the Isabel Bader theater (Lett/Smith), McKinsey building (Hariri Pontarini Architects) and the Gardiner museum (KPMB) among many others.
Back of house / quadrangle, looking east
Working with context as the main idea driving this shoot, it really opened our eyes the relationship this building has with its surroundings. This is one of the main motivations behind moriyama and Teshima's work and we had a lot of fun working at making this evident in our photographs.
Quadrangle
Hopefully our readers are able to get a better understanding of the project from an urban perspective and we would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section.