jjakucyk

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How likely is it to change though? Granted I think the way the uptown route is connected to the OTR loop is mind-bogglingly stupid, but there are geometric considerations that force it to go a certain way. I think a more risky proposition would be having to interrupt service to tear up relatively new track to install the turnouts. Granted if properly planned it can be done over a weekend, but it still seems like doing it now would make selling the extension that much easier.

What's the status of the non-Duke utility relocations? We had a bunch of updates on that after the groundbreaking, but I haven't heard much since.

I'd swear I've heard that one before, years ago. It's pretty stupid. The view worth having is the one coming down the cut in the hill in Kentucky. Anyone trying to enjoy the view from the trench is not paying attention to traffic like they should. If it's that important, they can exit to one of the surface streets.

"close off Atlantic, Arbor, and Hyde Park avenues at Edwards Road" Yes, because the solution to traffic problems is to eliminate alternate routes by clipping the grid and forcing all traffic onto the already congested arterial streets. Brilliant! The styrofoam blocks are just that. They're stay-in-place concrete forms that get stuccoed or bricked over and provide a sandwich of insulation for the exterior walls.

Planned obsolescence or not the monocultural aspects of development are something to be very concerned about. What gives older neighborhoods that developed over a long period of time a lot of their resilience is the variety in type, style, and age of the building stock. When you have a monoculture, everything ages at the same rate and suffers the same issues of age and design as everything around it. So you go through boom and bust cycles as the entire neighborhood has to turn over at once. This is a problem in large redevelopment areas like City West, as well as in many suburbs where all the housing stock in a particular subdivision is built to the same style and for the same demographic. This is getting many of the inner suburbs in big trouble as their housing stock (small Cape Cod style houses from the '40s or the tiny early ranches of the '50s and '60s) is all getting pretty old and worn, and their floor plans aren't quite as popular as newer houses. This can bring down an entire neighborhood in short order as everything becomes old and obsolete at once. In a more varied environment, there would only be a few such buildings needing rehab or replacement at a time, so it doesn't bring down the whole place. Hopefully with Phase 2 of The Banks, plus whatever happens on the caps, this part of downtown will get some variety. Being mixed use helps mitigate the problems some, but the issue of being built all at about the same time is still of concern.

Why do we have to do away with all "superfluous" decoration? Who decides what's superfluous or not? Your argument isn't about doing away with stylistic rules, but replacing classical rules with modern ones. They're still rules! "Ornament is a crime" is a rule. What about choice? We as a society have been building upon the lessons of our past for thousands of years. Do we throw out our entire cultural knowledge about cuisine and start over in the chemistry lab just because we can do it all with chemicals now? No. Do we throw out everything we've learned about literature and poetry and only post gibberish videos on the internet? No. Do we all wear plain color spandex jumpsuits because cottons and wools with patterns or any detail are old fashioned and not a product of our time? No. There's room for modern cuisine (even processed foods), new media like video, and many different types of clothing from spandex to silk and wool. So why is it that everything we learned about architecture before about 1930 is shunned? Surely there's room for both, we can still build on the past. That's the whole point of classicism is that it's not static, it builds on itself and gets more and more refined over time, but it doesn't forget its roots. Proponents of modernism seem completely unable to just leave classicism alone, they have to destroy it too for some reason. The master chef who creates some new French/Vietnamese fusion dish doesn't have to discredit the historical dishes that came before. Stanley Kubrick and Tim Burton may not like or care about Shakespeare or Charles Dickens, but they don't ignore everything they did, and have built upon their developments in theater and writing through others. Seriously, why is architecture so "special" that it's supposedly immune from the lessons of human history? The answer is that it's not. That's why the more modern stuff that completely ignores history is so thoroughly rejected by the general populace. That doesn't mean all history is better than all new, but the rise of historic preservation coincided with the point at which the replacement of the old by the new was viewed as a loss rather than a gain. Classicism and modernism should not be an either-or proposition, and both should be held to a higher standard so we don't end up replacing the good with the bad.

northsider, I agree with you about the CAC. It's not a bad building and it's one of the few examples of highly contemporary design that actually works pretty well in an urban context. Many of her other buildings though, like the Guangzhou Opera House are complete garbage. Living in Gin, regarding the materials of the Columbus building, I just think you're equating design and materials too much. Like I said, the design of the building: the lines, the proportions, the articulation, the use of the Tuscan order, the patterning of the windows, are all good. It's not perfect no, but to say it's a bad design because it was built with cheap materials is failing to give it the credit it's due. Usually that plastic stuff is so poorly proportioned and executed that it looks completely ridiculous and cartoony. So if it's gotta be cheap plastic, at least it's of a form that people respond positively to and can understand. The thing about these modern materials is that they can be made to look like anything you want. So the "honesty" of the materials are only judged by fashion and taste. The most true form of most of these materials is a formless blob on the ground, or some hopper full of pellets waiting to be melted down. Is a molded column really that dishonest compared to a molded flat panel or bizarre curvy shape? I never said theme park schlock or starchitecture are the only options, but that seems to be the way it usually ends up. Notice how the argument goes, "well yes there's a ton of modernist crap out there, but look at all these people who can do good stuff that nobody's ever heard of." That's not a particularly convincing argument. I'm particularly fond of the work of James Cutler myself, someone who makes warm and inviting spaces. The trouble is that most of the good stuff that's done isn't published or recognized by the AIA or the architecture magazines because it's not edgy enough. Most normal people don't like edgy, they want comfort and stuff they understand on an intuitive level. You're right that The Banks isn't really minimalist, stripped down is a better term. Still, that's pretty similar. Little detail, simple forms, and uninteresting. It doesn't have that austere quality that the very good minimalist stuff has. They're really background buildings. "learning stuff is hard, so why bother?" Come on now, that's not what I said at all. The discourse is so lopsided that nobody except those already part of the avant garde want to engage in it. Why would some schlub off the street want to learn about an architect's building when its goal is to confound them and make them feel small and out of touch? Who would want to learn about someone who's standing on a pedestal pissing on them from above? It's pretty clear they don't care about you, so why should you care about them or the bullshit post-rationalized explanation for their incomprehensible designs? Architecture isn't pure art like a painting or a sculpture, but many of these architects want it to be so. If you don't like or don't want to learn about some abstract painting, you don't have to, and you don't have to deal with it anymore. That's not the case with buildings. When the roof leaks and the windows are cold and glaring in the sun, the users inside get to know only hate for the architects that stuck them in such a predicament. Sloped floors and window sills, curved walls that mess up furniture placement, and materials that rip your shirt or rub off on your pants don't help. But it's art! The notion that new urbanists fetishize faux classicism and the ye olde towne square is a straw man. Many of the best new urbanist developments decouple the planners from the architects. Seaside, Florida, for whatever criticism it gets for the architecture, was only laid out by DPZ, they didn't design the buildings, they just laid out the streets and put the zoning code in place. Even so, the kind of walkable mixed-use communities that new urbanists try to create are mostly (but not entirely) incompatible with many of the tenets of modernism. Long low horizontal buildings don't work because the lots are too small. Glass and steel highrises don't work because they're boring to pedestrians and highrises aren't allowed or needed. "Art object" blob buildings don't work because they require too much wasteful "greenspace" around them and they're anti-pedestrian. I'd also like to point out that nearly every photo posted above crops out the ground level. Gotta get those pesky ugly pedestrians out of the picture of the pretty building! That's exactly what I was talking about regarding buildings that are made to impress in photos and renderings, that are so big they can only be viewed properly from a distance, and where the street level interface with people is so lacking and despotic that it's easier to just ignore it. The picture of the courtyard with the fountain is actually the nicest space of all, but not because of the building in the background. It's an intimate scale with nice materials that are also mostly human scaled (brick, paving blocks, small stones, all things that can be placed by hand). The second photo (with the Boss store) is a decent pedestrian street, though the horizontality of the buildings evokes a language of linear speed and cars, not something that's really right for a pedestrian environment. It's also pretty boring to look at, which is possibly intentional as they want people to pay attention to the store displays rather than the buildings above, but that's not really a proper civic goal. One thing to remember in all this is that there is a difference between architecture and urbanism in all this. The Banks, the Columbus cap building, the pedestrian street I just talked about, those all have good urban form. They're up to the sidewalk, they have stores on the ground level, there's windows into the stores, etc. I can't speak for the urbanism of many of the other buildings, though most of them appear to at least be brought up to the sidewalk with some sort of ground floor component (at least where it's not cropped off). Having good urbanism with questionable architecture is of course better than bad urbanism and bad architecture too, like the casino. *cough*

What do you consider the difference between "faux-classical theme park schlock" and actual classicism? The Columbus cap building is quite well executed classicism from a design standpoint, it's just lacking in the materials and color. It does look very plastic, but the proportions, arrangement of the parts and pieces, scale, and detailing are really pretty good. Also, your comparison to doctors and attorneys is flawed because those disciplines do not have the artistic design components to their professions that architects do. The doctor performing surgery or the attorney practicing law are more akin to the structural engineer designing the beams and columns or the mechanical engineer designing the heating and air conditioning system. The current architectural practices which produce uninspired minimalism like The Banks or baffling starchitecture are more like that heart surgeon "fixing" your heart by ripping it out of your chest and reconnecting it above your ass, because that's edgy and contrarian. Normal people may not understand the complex intricacies of the cardiovascular system, contract law, or building codes, but they do understand why doctors and lawyers do what they do. What they don't understand is why architects design so much crap that only other architects like, that makes everyone else hate them. While there's certainly minimalism out there that's serene and accessible to everyone, more often than not that isn't the goal. Minimalism like at The Banks is simply value engineering and lazy design taken to its furthest extent. Starchitecture like the works of Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Daniel Liebskind, and Zaha Hadid is intentionally made to baffle the general public. They don't want it to be comprehensible because that elevates their egos. Their buildings subjugate people through immense scale, fractured and physics-defying geometries, uncomfortable materials, and poor functionality. The classical building, while it can be dripping with decoration, is nonetheless an expression of simple structural and material practicalities developed and refined over thousands of years. The proportions, even for very large classical buildings, are still based on human scales (vertical like the standing person rather than horizontal like the dead one, small to medium to big rather than big to bigger to huge, feet body and head as opposed to a hulking monolith, etc.). So no, needing to go to a library to educate yourself about a particular style is not an option. That's not even really possible today. You can't just read up on late 20th and early 21st century modernism. You'd have to read up on all those starchitects I mentioned above individually to try to comprehend their own specific works, because their style is their own and nobody else's (ego again). Plus there's all the other not-quite-so-famous ones, and all the wannabes. Who has time for that? Besides, why would anyone want to learn about a building that makes them feel like an unwanted insect infesting some abstract art object masquerading as a building? Historically architecture has been about communicating messages through built form about who we are, where we came from, what our traditions are, and what we aspire to as a society. Buildings related to us as individual people through honest expressions of structure and material, through proportions we find attractive as based on the human body, and sometimes with decorations to keep us interested in looking at, touching, and experiencing them at a more intimate scale. When those tenets are thrown in the garbage and buildings are only meant to look good in renderings from a half mile away, or from aerial photographs, or from the highway at 70 mph, and they confound people and make them uncomfortable, then who can blame them for hating them so much, and not wanting to even bother to understand them?

^ That's awesome. 961 is such a glorious building, and to see it sitting in such disrepair has been really sad.

The south elevation is exactly where windows SHOULD be. There should be some overhangs at each floor to minimize solar gain yes, but in the summer the sun angle is so high, plus the sun rises and sets way to the north, that the sun simply doesn't penetrate into the building much even when there's no shading. In the winter the angle is lower and sunrise and sunset are to the south as well, so you get the sun in more when you need it. East and west are terrible for curtain walls because you can't block the sun at all from above as it comes straight in at a low angle, nor can you block it from the sides because of how much its position varies over the year. The hot morning and evening sun blasts in during the summer, but it's too weak to be of any use in the winter. The only real advantage to having many windows on the north side is that you get consistent diffused light for most of the day throughout most of the year. That's good for artist lofts and factories and general daylighting. The downside however is that you never get any solar gain in the winter while getting some in the early morning and late evening in the height of summer. In hot climates that's ok, but the northern exposure bleeds a ton of heat out of the building all day throughout the winter months.

How about state and local funding too? I'd love to see a similar graph showing ALL spending on those modes, and adding non-highway roads and local streets too. That last one is the difficult part, but there's no way it's not a big number. The trouble is that while you can fairly easily track federal, state, and even local expenditures on highways, aviation, and rails, because it all flows through a small number of government entities, tracking all the spending on local streets and roads would be a monumental task. There's got to be a way to do it though, and it would be very illustrative of just how much money is spent on roadway infrastructure that gets no gas tax dollars, and very little state or federal funds (usually only earmarked for specific projects on a one-time basis).

Well, job sprawl is the big problem really, not just industrial sprawl per se. There's tons of jobs in retail and offices, workshops, warehousing, etc., that are in sprawl locations, and that's much more difficult to deal with. Think about it like this, if we only had residential sprawl, and thus all jobs remained in the city center, you could still serve nearly everyone with transit as they're all going downtown to work and shop. This is basically the pattern of pre-WWII streetcar and railroad suburbs. If point A is downtown, you only have to connect points B, C, D, E, F, etc. with point A to make it work well. When you have job sprawl however, you don't have a central residential nexus with businesses around the periphery, you have everything scattered around all over the place. It's not like everyone lives in point A and works in B, C, D, E, F, etc., some live in A and work in C, some live in D and work in F, some live in E and work in B. That's so highly distributed that it's next to impossible to serve with transit. Also, how much industry in the US is actually that much of a nuisance anymore? Sure there's some businesses that can be noisy or that pollute, but it's not like we're building new steel mills, ore smelters, or leather tanneries. Many industrial businesses nowadays are difficult to discern from simple office buildings or warehouses. Most of them close up shop promptly at 5:00 anyway, so who really cares if they're next door?

I don't buy it. To the "common man" these buildings are unobtrusive, inoffensive, bland, and completely forgettable. They're not interesting in the least, so nobody will give them a second glance, but they're not so bland that they look stark and brutal. They're the TGI Friday's, Honda Accord, cardigan sweaters of architecture. It's boring mediocrity to the extreme. I see way less than 15 pieces of flair. Also, and I know I've harped on this a few times already in other threads, but seriously, it's ok to build boring crap because it's better than a parking lot? I'm sorry but that kind of attitude is why we can't have anything nice. This is a prominent downtown location, so what if it was crapped all over in the past, new development should still be held to a high standard of excellence.

It looks like the same crap to me, just with the addition of some curved curtain walls on one side. Whoop-de-freaking-doo

Oh yes I've been by there, and there's a similar development in Carthage too. What I find odd about it is that these very low-slung houses are on lots with such big setbacks. It really hurts the feeling of community, partly because the scale is just so out of whack.

You'd have to look back through the thread, but I believe they can support 4-6 stories.

Green roofs or roof terraces don't really make effective public spaces unless there's some way to access it from ground level (say the building is on a very steep slope where the high end is at grade). Otherwise, it's just too much of an inconvenience to go up some stairs or take an elevator just to go from outside to outside. It's also a case of "out of sight, out of mind" which leads to underutilization and perceived lack of safety.

"Open space" is not the same as a lawn, open space is undefined, and if you don't define it you usually get crap. Open space can just as easily be a parking lot, or a berm next to a highway, or a smelly water retention pond. The only real criteria for open space is no buildings. If you want a lawn, say you want a lawn, don't say open space. That said, what about Yeatmans Cove? There's plenty of open lawn for playing there. Also, to go to the effort to cap a highway and then not put buildings on that cap is a huge waste of resources. The point of capping is to reclaim that land for productive (i.e. taxable) use. To use it as a park makes it a drain on city coffers. We also don't need park or plaza space there. Fountain square (plaza) is just two blocks north, and Smale (park) is a block and a half south. It really needs buildings to stitch the fabric of the city together there. That doesn't mean there can't be some nice public space, like an arcade or something. If you want to see what a failure of highway capping looks like, from an urbanistic perspective anyway, just look at the Big Dig in Boston. The whole problem was that the Central Artery sliced through the heart of the city, separating neighborhoods from each other and taking up valuable real estate. Well, although there's no longer an ugly raised highway, it's still a scar sliced through the heart of the city, separating neighborhoods from each other and taking up valuable real estate. There's so much "open space" left that even a busy vibrant place like Boston can't keep most of it filled with people, and that's a major problem for any park.

I'd also like to state that the ballot language doesn't appear to me to exempt the casino from local zoning laws and regulations, it just says that those laws and regulations can't prevent the casino from being built or operating. So while it could be that since "casino" wasn't in any of the local zoning codes then it's given carte blanche, that doesn't mean it couldn't still have been regulated.

Then we'll never build any great new context. Just because there's not much to walk to up Reading doesn't mean it can't still be a pleasant place and extend the walkable core to its fullest. Again, the answer to bad development is not to write it off and just allow even worse crap, but to look at it as an opportunity to improve. If we only improve the stuff that's already good, then we end up with a tiny fraction of very nice places and unfathomably large swathes of garbage that have no hope of ever being redeemed. It's this mentality that leads to exactly what I saw a little earlier today, some poor schlub in a wheelchair plodding along the shoulder of Beechmont Avenue. But it's just a crappy suburban shopping strip you say, nobody will want or need to go through there on foot, bike, wheelchair, or any other mode, so why bother making it nice? Except there's always people who have to trudge through there at some point for one reason or another. Look at all the roads with no sidewalks that nonetheless have paths worn down in the grass. Atlas brings up a good point. There's lots of context for the casino to respond to. What's most important to respond to are those buildings directly across the street. This is a notion that seems to be lost on planners and designers these days. The major roads form the boundaries of the project rather than the organizing spine and nothing outside that boundary seems to exist anymore. This is a mostly suburban pod-based typology. That's where you see an office park on one corner of an intersection, a strip shopping center on another, garden apartments on the third, and single family houses with their backs to the through streets on the fourth. That's a totally disjointed and anti-urban paradigm.

But that doesn't mean the building itself, or even the land parcel, has to be all casino, basically single use. With all the wasted space between the building and sidewalks you could still "skin" it with some narrow shops and other buildings that would have a more symbiotic relationship with the street.

Well certainly nobody now. This mentality that "it was already pretty bad, so it's ok to make it worse" really needs to die. There was an opportunity here to make this stretch of Reading Road better, to help stitch that corner of OTR in with the casino development. Why is it ok to take a marginal street and make it worse, but not ok to try to make it better? We could have a little retail, loft housing, small offices, or even something a bit more industrial like live-work lofts or who knows. what else The point is that it could be done a lot better and be an asset to the community, but instead it's just a car sewer that will do nothing to help with any redevelopment on the north side of Reading on top of everything else.

I agree with everything that's been said, especially KJP's comments about this being the cusp of a large cultural transition based on the reduction in driving. The interesting thing about Keith's comments above is that these massive transportation projects are tied into so many other special interests including local construction companies, labor unions, etc. There is a big economic development impact to getting a major project like this in your district and it would take a local rep with some major cahones to vote against such projects Like Steve Chabot?

That's a bit better than I thought, but it's still less than impressive. A few extra feet of sidewalk (though I'm betting it's going to be a planting strip) isn't going to help much when you're walking next to a highway. And look at all that blank wall across the street. It's like a stack of cardboard boxes. The jail has more character than this thing.