Ummm they just shot up two floors in less than a week. So I’ll give it 2023.
 
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The Familia said:
What’s a 5 over 1? Considering the lot and location, I’m happy anything is being built! I have very low expectations this will look anything like the renderings, but as long as it looks even remotely decent it will be a win.
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I assume it’s young people lingo or slang for five storeys of residential over one storey of something else. Silly kids.
 
haltcatchfire said:
I assume it’s young people lingo or slang for five storeys of residential over one storey of something else. Silly kids.
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It's basically the easiest/cheapest building that can be approved based on a common technicality of the fire codes in North America. 5 wooden floors and base concrete floor with the insinuation that if the fire code wasn't the way it was, all 6 floors would be wooden.
 
They're very controversial in the US, where they've been used to redevelop a lot of inner-city neighbourhoods. A good example is the Oak Lawn/Old East Dallas area of Dallas (basically, the area of the inner-city north of Dallas' central business district). Just by looking at Google Maps' satellite view, you can see all the massive block-sized wood-frame apartment buildings. People consider them bland, cheap, and monotonous. They're not necessarily wrong.

However, IMHO, this is another example of a building form getting blamed for what is essentially a problem with the streetscape. American cities in particular have no appetite to change the car-dependent design of their streets. It doesn't matter if it's "towers-in-the-park", "new urbanism", or the "five-over-one". If you build it on the side of a stroad, it's going to look depressing and monotonous.

Thankfully for Calgary, while our inner-city is also getting rebuilt with five-over-ones, our road network is better and we don't have the same history of slum clearance that have left huge swaths of empty space that can be developed into mega-blocks. Flyover Block shares little in common with the kinds of five-over-one developments that are generating controversy in the US.
 
MissingMiddle said:
Uhh, the entire East Village/River's District?
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Touche. I guess I should say, Calgary's inner-city is not the vast swath of empty dirt lots and strip malls, crisscrossed by expressways that you find in the US. The redevelopment of the East Village and River's District is very different than what's happening in Oak Lawn and Old East Dallas.
 
I do think that 5 over 1 can lead to the same banal building. I think we’re beginning to see that somewhat in areas that are starting to get a high concentration of these types of buildings (Marda Loops as an example).

There are some nice 5 over 1 buildings, but it mostly comes down to the quality of the exterior material, which is often lacking in this type of building because the whole point of this form of building is to reduce costs.
 
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