Archinect - News

A new tall mass timber proposal is heating up the race to the top in Toronto

2022-07-15T13:02:00-04:00

Around the same time the new world record holder for tall mass timber buildings — the 25-story Ascent tower — is making its much-awaited debut in Milwaukee, another North American design proposal has been revealed in Toronto that would surmount the historic milestone by a total of six stories if approved.

The proposed 31-story residential tower is being floated by 26-year-old developer Jackey Chen, who says an impressive 80% of the building’s 494 total apartment units will be made affordable under the city’s Open Door program, with project costs totaling between $75 and $80 million. Toronto studio ICON Architects will serve as the building’s designer.

The development would entail the preservation of three semi-detached heritage buildings located in front of its would-be podium and take around two years to complete following an anticipated start of construction sometime before 2025. The proposed plan would join a list of at least five other mass timber developments in the GTA that in...

Undulating glass tower with canted, gridded facades coming to Hudson Yards site

2019-08-23T14:30:00-04:00

Architects DSM Design Group and Marx Development Group have unveiled renderings for an undulating glass tower slated for New York City's Hudson Yards.

The 487-foot tower design differs markedly from previous iterations of the project, which displayed more conventional and monolithic glass skin designs. The latest version of the tower, according to a rendering published by New York YIMBY, features a skinny, undulating body wrapped in canted gridded glass facades. Stacked in two-floor modules, the cuboid tower appears to move as it rises, reflecting the sky and its surroundings in slightly oblique compositions. The lower levels of the building contain a series of protruding double- and triple-height volumes .

New York YIMBY reports that excavation for the project's foundations are well underway and that the structure will eventually contain a 531-room hotel. Additionally, the site reports that the project is due to be completed in the fall of 2022.

Arquitectonica designs a 53-story Jenga-like tower near LA's Pershing Square

2018-11-05T13:49:00-05:00

JMF Development Co. [...] hopes to construct a 53-story tower on the vacant, L-shaped lot which wraps the historic structure. [...] Arquitectonica is designing the proposed 784-foot-tall glass-and-steel tower, which is highlighted by a collection of cantilevered, glass-bottom pools for residents on the building's upper levels. While some of the protrusions would extend over the Pershing Square Building, none would hover above the public right-of-way.

Image: JMF Development Co., via urbanize.la.

A rather dramatic example of the stacked-boxes scheme might go up at 5th and Hill, near Pershing Square, in Downtown Los Angeles soon.

Designed by Arquitectonica, JMF Development Co. proposes the 53-story tower with its fiercely protruding glass-bottom swimming pools as two potential options: few condominiums + hotel/restaurant if signs of a lurking next recession became clearer vs. plenty of condos + ground-floor retail space if the economic outlook stays strong.