Window on World

Every time you open up your building at grade with a penetration (doors/windows), you:

-create additional value for both tenant and landlord

This is just as true for a residential apartment as it is for an office building or an arena. 

I mean where would you rather live? In an apartment at grade that has its own doorway directly leading to the outside and maybe a little private patio or one that relies on an internal corridor and central access point for all apartments…

Imagine if every ground floor apartment in the above complex had its own ingress/egress. The building would produce higher rents, tenants would have a better experience (especially if they have children) and neighborhoods would be safer–more eyes on the street mean more life and more personal safety for all.

This is a principle we put to use at Canadian Tire Centre more than 20 years ago. We sank the arena half into the ground–first, to make the building more human scale, second, to divide internal pedestrian traffic flows into two components (one goes up, one goes down) and third, to place the main concourse at grade so stores can be double loaded.

That means we could have restaurants, services and stores at grade that had their own window on the world (piercings at grade) plus they would face into the concourse. In this way, they can be busy even on dark days (periods when there is nothing going on inside the arena) and super busy serving the public and attendees on event days.

Here are a few pictures of CTC I took yesterday that demonstrate the WOW concept–

You have to admit, it’s better to have many building envelope piercings than more blank walls like this:

@ profbruce