Hamilton Residential Intensification Guide
July 31st, 2010, by Jeremy Krygsman
Last spring, I started working with GSP Group, an award winning urban design and planning firm based in Kitchener, Ontario. This was my first project: as part of a residential intensification guide for the City of Hamilton, I prepared a series of renderings and plans for five different theoretical redevelopment sites across the city. Here they are:
Site 1: Downtown Tower
Characteristics: podium office/retail, up to 12 storeys residential.
This twelve storey building fits into a downtown setting perfectly, with setbacks to allow light to reach street level retailers.
Site 2: Grocery Store Redevelopment
Characteristics: mixed use, low rise
This site, formerly a grocery store, provides an opportunity for several low-rise buildings, parking, and greenery. All buildings face the street, and range from condominiums to townhouses to live-work uses.
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New Songdo International City
September 25th, 2009, by Jeremy Krygsman
Green Motion City
This urban design project was an entry for the Incheon Urban Design Completition. It was designed by me and my friends Ryan Felix, Jiffy Lee, and Meaghan Mendonca, over a few months in early summer 2009. Below the fold is a series of images from the display panel, formatted to fit your screen. Enjoy!
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Alliance Tower
September 23rd, 2009, by Jeremy Krygsman
Alliance Tower is a premier office tower design conceived in 2006 when I sketched the concept on a peice of paper in one of my high school classes. I even made a quick model then, but this summer, I decided to test my 3d Studio skills and turn it into a real architectural visualization.
The tower is 42 stories and 144m high. It features a three storey, circular lift hall sheathed in glass, with a radiant pattern of light wells to fully naturally illuminate the interior of the space. The spire tapers geometrically, inspired by the layers and petals of a flower. Most of the usable floor space is within a few metres of a window, with great views from any spot in the tower.
Continue reading.
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A Digital City 3.0
September 22nd, 2009, by Jeremy Krygsman
Welcome to A Digital City version 3! My goal for the new layout was to permit a more visually immersive experience, especially with the custom background feature. In the coming months, I will be updating my portfolio to include all the goodies I’ve been working on recently, so look forward to it!
If you have any feedback (especially negatives!), let me know in the comments section. Otherwise, enjoy!
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My Visit to Hong Kong: Part 3
July 6th, 2009, by Jeremy Krygsman
Busy with their daily life on chaotic streets, the residents of Hong Kong do not seem to care very much about the buildings above their heads. To a visitor, however, they are absolutely awe inspiring, if not mind boggling. According to Wikipedia, Hong Kong is the most vertical city in the world with 7,650 skyscrapers. In some areas, this level of density is enough to cause real overcrowding at street level, especially in key shopping districts.
Built Form :: Architecture is the first thing people notice in a city, even if they don’t realize it.
- A large part of Hong Kong is made up of rather nondescript, 10-20 storey tall tenement blocks that are often dirty and discoloured.
- Besides that, there are many examples of excellent planning in the city. Every space is used to the fullest, and places that would be ignored in North America are often turned into gardens or sculptural features.
- There is almost no historically significant buildings left, having been taken over by new development. Luckily, most new development of high quality; though to have real character, it is beneficial for a city to have some historic elements.
- The bottom line is, Hong Kong is the capital of glittering towers of glass and steel!
Since a picture is worth a thousand words when it comes to architecture, we will take a look at the different styles of building in Hong Kong through a gallery. If you would like to know where a picture was taken from, feel free to ask in the comments. Enjoy!
Modern :: Much attention is paid to the lower levels of important buildings to create lively public spaces.
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Belmont Village: This City Has Curves
May 7th, 2009, by Jeremy Krygsman
Belmont Village: The Movie may not be coming to theatres near you soon, but it is a story that will touch your heart (if you like city planning, that is). It is a story about the agonizing decline of a well-known commercial strip near downtown Kitchener, now transformed into a glittering urban district. Experience the soaring, eco-industrial space of the Atrium, and the unique shapes of the Convex and Concave parks… you can see it all here in the A Digital City presentation of Belmont Village: This City has Curves.
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Belmont Village: An Idea in the Making
March 17th, 2009, by Jeremy Krygsman
I would just like to point out the latest page I have added to my Portfolio, called Belmont Village: An Excercise in Creativity. It features a display panels and some amazing 3D modeling I have been working on as part of a major team urban design project for one of my classes at the University of Waterloo. In the next week, I will be finishing a model of the entire site, and will post an updated version shortly after the project is complete. Here is an example!
Need I say more? Go check it out!
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A Modern Toronto Subway Station
January 19th, 2009, by Jeremy Krygsman
The appearance of a typical
TTC subway entrance.
The Toronto Subway is run by the Toronto Transit Commission, and serves over 1.2 million people every day. It has 4 underground lines and one above ground line, of which the Young-University-Spadina line is the oldest. Transit service on this line is generally excellent, with trains arriving 3 to 4 minutes during rush hour. However, there is one major problem with the subway: it can be very confusing to an outsider like me, and it tends to look downright ugly!
I’m sure it can be improved, however, and I’ve spent several hours designing a new subway entrance – it was a great learning experience! Perhaps later I will finish with an entire station design, complete with signage and everything, but without further adieu, here it us!
Lit up at night.
The bathroom tiled walls of most TTC subway stations do have some cultural and historic significance, and really they don’t look half bad when they’re well maintained and surrounded by a modern structure!
If you like the design, please comment!
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Thoughts on Bailouts, Deficit Spending
January 3rd, 2009, by Jeremy Krygsman
There has been pressure in Canada to deliver stimulus packages and bailouts to every big company that needs them during the credit crisis. A wave of bailouts began in the American financial sector, and has now spread quickly to the auto sector, which appeared to be on the brink of collapse.
If Prime Minister Harper must
follow an economic policy word
for word, it should be Chancellor
Merkel’s, not President Bush’s.
But first, let’s get one thing straight. Canada’s banks were rated the strongest in the world in October. The government did not have to act to protect them, something that was deemed necessary in the United States. This is a good thing: to me, a capitalist system should not throw money at failing companies — many of which are falling because of their own risk taking. Why should the government insure stupidity?
The next thing on the table is the bailout of the automakers. They are losing money at ridiculous rates, so the American government decided to use taxpayer money to avert their imminent collapse. Perhaps such a measure was necessary given the current state of the American financial system — but it is certainly not necessary here in Canada! If the auto companies are really worthy of a “bridge loan”, they should be able to get it from our (healthy) banks. If the banks won’t even lend to them, why should our government!
Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, seems to be one of the few world leaders who are making sense on the economy right now.
The Chancellor has said she won’t engage in “senseless” competition with other countries to deliver stimulus packages. [article]
This is exactly what Canada should be doing as well. Sure, if other countries want to bail out inefficient, inept, and money losing corporations, let them do it. But here in Canada, let’s keep our government out of deficit, and let hard earned cash stay in the pockets of people who have actually worked for it.
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My Visit to Hong Kong: Part 2
December 19th, 2008, by Jeremy Krygsman
Buses in Hong Kong
Extremely dense, mixed use
city blocks
Older style tenements
Inside of a highway cloverleaf
A streetcar with an elevated
highway in the background
Hong Kong is the ultimate urban machine. Each part is carefully placed and tuned so that the entire system can run at high speed, 24/7, it has to be! The lights in this city are never out; people work early in the morning until late into the evening, while shopping areas are packed with people during the midday and evening hours, and entertainment districts keep the late night and early morning hours busy.
Every inch of this city is used up as well, and almost always with more than one floor. There are some areas downtown where you feel like you’re in one of those sci-fi cities of the future, the ones where neighborhoods are classified in vertical levels. There are good and bad things about a city this dense, as well as some important lessons to learn about it.
Mass Transit and Road Networks :: If the roads are the arteries of Hong Kong, the busses are its blood cells
- City bus service is excellent, with a number of bus companies running a range of vehicles, from huge double deck buses to smaller van sized vehicles. A single double decker bus can fit a huge number of people inside, and they usually come at most every ten minutes!
- Most major buildings have large bus terminals in the basement.
- Hong Kong subways are clean, frequent, and very well designed. The system has an excellent interlining system, so when you get off at a station to transfer to another line, you usually just have to walk across the platform to get on the train to where you want to go.
- Subways are the gateway to a true world-class city!
- Roads are very well designed and generally move smoothly. Flyovers and elevated highways are a common and necessary part of the transportation infrastructure.
- Toronto could learn from the use of space below elevated highways in Hong Kong — most of them stand elegantly on a wide central pier, and have sculptural dividers or even gas stations below them.
One of the biggest positives about a dense city like Hong Kong is the constant availability of mass transit. However, density comes with costs; such as a lack of historic building stock, and a level of overcrowding that can become tiresome for a North American.
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