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Originally Posted by Marshal
Apologies Spr0ckets but that was quite the over reaction. I also think your answer falls short. "Too expensive, wasteful and inefficient" is all off the mark. Many many of our towers 'hide' the mechanical box within the design envelope. Its been typical for 30-40 years. There has even been municipal legislation requiring 'unique' roof line forms in the past. Yes, it costs money, but no more than many other typical elements.
Regardless, the real answer to Repthe250 is that the boxes are less than fictions. There is no design intent behind them. The boxes are just place holders symbolizing towers. It is likely they were added consciously to make the plan more readable. If you erased them it would be difficult to easily see what is intended.
These drawings are not design drawings but developmental drawings in the process to define the nature of the whole project; part of the process to get a handle on the density, massing, spacing, and layout. While the design of the street and public realm is critical to this and look fairly defined, it too may change significantly.
Once approvals come and the project proceeds is when the actual design of individual buildings happens. For big projects like this, only a portion of the whole will be realized as a beginning phase. It will be designed as you would expect. Further phases are designed in order of construction and may or may not continue the design character of the first. (See Southgate City to see this hapening right now, or Brentwood, Laugheed, etc. for projects further along.)
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Agree to disagree.
I stand by my original point that it is prohibitively more expensive to do it that way (extend the curtail wall the full height of the mechanical level story or an extra storey beyond that) than what is typcially the standard norm which is stepping back to the mechanical/elevetor overrun envelop and enclosing that with a standard wall system.
So much so that most developers opt NOT to go that route and spend on a part of the building or project that's not even going to be seen by most.
Most developers are seeking to save costs and this would be one of the areas you would indeed cut costs - unless you're housing a rooftop level amenities or designing a s[ecial feature rooftop crown element or something like that.
Sure it's done in some projects - typically office and commercial towers where their budget is already greater anyway- but in residential projects such as these that aren't exactly high-end, then the expecation would be for them to NOT do so rather than to, especially if they're not compelled by municipal legislation.
As for the second part of your response, I'm not really sure what point you were making, since Repthe250's question had more to do with why they exist at all in the first place (from a design perspective) or why they have to be so conspicuous rather than whether it was a question of readability in the drawings or representational norms in diagrammatics.
Yes, I realize this is a conceptual massing (with placeholder forms) for the urban master plan concept and therefore not a design drawing or document, but I hardly suspect that that's where his query was focused.
Whatever gets built after design development and construction is going to have mechanical penthouse and elevator overrun protrusions or levels in one form or another.