Associate Professor Ted Kesik was recently featured in an article on "re-skinning" Toronto's older condo towers in The Globe and Mail.

The story focuses on Grenadier Gardens, two residential high-rises designed by Uno Prii in 1972 that may be the first to undergo "tower renewal" in the GTA. The ideas behind tower renewal — which involve, among other things, retrofitting our aging stock of multi-unit residential buildings to make them more energy efficient — grew out of research at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. The City of Toronto worked with researchers and others to create its own Tower Renewal program based on this work.

"[Kesik has] spent the past decade working on how to transform mid-20th century energy-hogs into 21st-century energy-sipping hamsters via over-cladding (or “re-skinning”) and window replacement," writes Globe columnist Dave LeBlanc. "This research, gathered in the 2009 tome Tower Renewal Guidelines (Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design), may not be light Sunday reading, but it’s become required reading at city hall, especially in the Tower Renewal Office. Let us hope condominium boards and private owners of 1950s-1970s buildings will do likewise when they see energy costs continue to rise and shorter life spans on 'Band-Aid' solutions. With tower renewal, says Prof. Kesik, older buildings 'will beat the pants off the greenest high-rise towers that we’re building today; so imagine taking a 1968 Camaro and having it outperform, in fuel efficiency, a 2012 car.'"

Click here to read the full article.