Too bad we've got to wait 5 years...
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/real...sticks-to-his-architect-roots/article1633087/
John Bentley Mays
Toronto — From Friday's Globe and Mail
Published on Thursday, Jul. 08, 2010 12:59PM EDT
Last updated on Thursday, Jul. 08, 2010 1:13PM EDT
Gary Switzer, 55, has seen Toronto’s residential-development industry from every angle.
Trained as an architect, he laboured over working drawings in the office of Webb Zerafa for a few years, then joined the city’s planning department. Mr. Switzer quickly tired of the planner’s task of tweaking and tending the development schemes of others, however, so he swung back into the private sector, with Great Gulf Homes. There for 21 years, he headed the firm’s high-rise operation, bringing to fruition some of Toronto’s most architecturally notable condominium towers of the boom era.
Mr. Switzer struck out on his own last year, and founded his company, MOD Developments. MOD launched (in partnership with Graywood Developments) its first project into the marketplace in June: the outstanding residential-commercial complex called Five, in the heart of downtown Toronto. MOD’s backer, by the way, is financial-services company Tricon, whose architecturally savvy president, Gary Berman, co-founded (with interior designer Anna Simone) the Pug Awards for Toronto’s most artistically popular buildings. The coalition of Mr. Switzer and Mr. Berman represents an entwining of business ambition, financial prowess and keen architectural awareness of a kind rarely seen in Hogtown’s recent real-estate history.
I talked with the voluble, brimming developer in the old Yonge Street mansion that MOD shares with Tricon. While understandably excited about Five – I reviewed it a couple of weeks ago in this column – he fondly recalled his successful years with Great Gulf, which, until his stint, was mainly known for suburban housing.
“I started Great Gulf’s high-rise division,†Mr. Switzer told me. “The owners had a vision of doing something more urban downtown. The guys at Great Gulf piqued my interest in terms of what kind of project I wanted to do. Our first [tall building project] was St. James, at King and Jarvis. That established our reputation in the community. From there, we went on to do the Morgan, the Hudson, X Condominiums, 18 Yorkville. I got the reputation as Mr. Tall Buildings, and so I was.â€
Mr. Switzer loves to build and look at skyscrapers, but he is no dreamy aesthete when it comes to great height. He confesses to “a little bit of vertigo.†He doesn’t like standing on the balconies of the condo towers he has put up across the downtown core. And he is deeply aware, as every developer of tall buildings must be, of the practical limits on the art he so admires.
“You’ve got issues of financing these large buildings,†he said. “You’ve got the technical issues and costs of doing tall buildings, the amount of pre-sales you need when you’re dong a 700-unit building. At a certain point it doesn’t quite make sense any more, if you’re not getting the sales. You have to charge so much to be building these structures. Buildings are becoming more and more unaffordable. The price point keeps going up from $400 a foot, to $500 a foot to $600 a foot, so obviously the purchaser profile gets much smaller. I worry about it. But developers are optimistic, sometimes even ignoring the writing on the wall.â€
The architects Mr. Switzer has employed in his projects have tended to design in historical styles. Peter Clewes, for example, cast his X Condominiums as an homage to the severely restrained manner of the great modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. But even strict modern tailoring comes at a price.
“Mies said ‘less is more.’ One of the guys at Great Gulf said that Mies never finished the sentence. It should go ‘Less is more expensive.’ If you do minimalism, as we did at X, you pay extra for those extruded mullions that try to mirror the Miesian I-beam on the exterior. We knew this was a significant aspect of the design of this building, so we spent extra money on it.â€
The clear and present danger in all this, of course, is that design quality will be compromised because of the soaring cost of building tall.
“The good developers will start with the architecture,†Mr. Switzer said. “My commitment to architecture is total. One of the reasons I felt comfortable in starting this new company in conjunction with Tricon was their commitment to design. I’m not interested in doing banal buildings, and just grinding it ou. I don’t think I would ever want to do a building if I weren’t excited by the architecture. It’s really in my blood.â€
