Jeff

I think its really just a public space, a museum, not a real park with trees. Thats a technical problem with this design as the water table at downtown Louisville is pretty high..the older buildings in the city have subbasements which are prone to flooding due to this, and have to be dewatered. Some more pix: Looking west on the elevated I-64 towards the thing...i see they sited it on-axis with the interstate, so there must have been some site considerations to the massing.... wireframe study with other downtown skyscrapers The museum space. The humanoid creatures bring to mind the droids in the closing segment of Kubrick/Speilbergs AI And the rather 'Batcave-esque" entry to the parking garage at the buildings base (but is that aqua blue spandrel glass on the curtain wall?...shades of The 800!) "...its the way of the future, the future, the future, the future...."(Leo Decaprio as Howard Hughs)

I tend to agree with that. The German aspect is sort of obscured. What about reviving Kramers or Gramers, that old German restaurant that used to be there?

Orange Frazier also put out a series of travel guides to Ohio, but I think they are out of print. These guides...the ones in the thread header.... are pretty good. I used them in conjunction with the WPA Ohio Guide for my road trip explortions of the state.

You do realize there are two bypasses around Louisville, so you dont have to travel through downtown.

If I was to be rude I'd say a few glasses of bourbon would make any deal look good. Anyway, some comments from architecture/design related blogs and forums. Life Without Buildings notes that this is a further developement of OMA's "hyperbuilding" concept, spefically perhaps a rework of a proposal for Bangkok from the mid/late 90s... ("..."brief, titillating brush with sci-fi"") ..or a riff on Russian Constructivism..which im sure has influenced Kookhaas/OMA. Actually the Louisville version looks more Constructivist. ...and some more pix from the CJ webpage. A cross section showing how the entry would work with Main Street. The access from Main Street to the area behind the floodwall, facing the river, is the big design problem with Louisvilles riverfront, and this is an interesting solution...actually it is more contextual than the earlier attempts to make this connection, at the Riverfront Plaza and the Kentucky Center for the Arts a two blocks to the east. I really like what they are doing here, using an existing 19th century commercial building, but tilting up the ground plane, compressing the space as you move deeper into the block, then expanding the space into a sort of atrium which recieves the angled elevator. The upslope also permits the spanning of the alley and floodwall to the plaza, which is shared with the Ali Center....so this entry feature becomes an entry from Main Street to both the elevator to the 20th floor art museum and to the Ali Center. And some views of the Museum, which are somewhat unclear as to whats happening yet...it looks like a play of solids and voids...maybe the solids are interior gallerys, sort of like the Josef Paul Kliehues' MOCA in Chicago (id like to see more on the diagonal elevator enters the 20th floor island) And, how they plan on building this sucker. ..watching the elevation of that museum piece is going to be a community event for sure. @@@@@@ I plan on going to Louisville next weekend and hope to get a better idea of this thing by visiting the display center they have set up...hopefully there will be plans and sections on view as well as the model and video.

So are you suggesting we deny people their rights because other people's children are cruel little monsters? I see it as a "whats best for the kid" issue not a rights issue.

I always thought this was the best argument against gay adoption or foster care; not the home situation but the hostile social context the kid would experience.

The lucky break here was that Hustead was adopted himself, so this is probably a personal issue with him, hence his opposition. I wonder if this is really a dead issue. I wonder where Blackwell stands on this, and also if a referendum could be in the works if the Legislature won't act.

I love this stuff, too....I guess im a "metalhead" as im into mills & foundrys. Theres a good song about the place..too...sung is sort of that Gamble/Huff "Philadelphia Sound" style, but by Grant Lee Buffalo Bethlehem Steel There was a light blue as a welder's torch It used to shine over the fields And all the wise men strong men were drawn for miles Followed a star to Bethlehem Steel Our mother's father worked here in World War Two On the main floor operating the drill And in his open palms little splinters remind him of The booming days days of Bethlehem Steel But the steeples on the hills they point To a better life beyond this one And that promise penetrates the clouds And mighty walls of brick red cinnamon Ah ah Take a walk past Lazarus Moving n' Storage Behind the Goodman's Furniture Store See the smoke stacks rise on up to heaven's step While on earth we're burnin' this miracle iron ore But the steeples on the hills they point To a better life beyond this one And that promise penetrates the clouds Even when they block the fiery sun The sun There was a light blue as a welder's torch It used to shine over the fields And all of the wise men strong men were drawn for miles Followed a star to Bethlehem Steel Then they fade out doing this riff... Bethlehem Steel Bethlehem Steel Bethlehem Steel Bethlehem Steel Yeah Steel Yeah Steel Bethlehem Steel Ah Steel Bethlehem Steel Bethlehem Steel Yeah Steel Steel Yeah Steel [A scrap of a phrase - Spoken] Oh Steel Ah Steel Great song, great tune, great industrial relic.

No family connections whatsover to Dayton, and tenous ones to Louisville. My family connections are to Chicago and Milwaulkee...and, beyond them, to Lodz & Poznan, Poland, and provincial Germany (Friedberg, a market town in Hesse, near Frankfurt am Main, and Nurnberg). A bit of a personal connection to this local landmark in Friedberg...the medieval "Stadkirche", or City Church. ...the roof and steeple are covered in slate, which is a traditional exterior building material in that part of Germany. My grandfather was a master roofer who specialized in slating, and he reslated the tower of this church after the war, I think.... His father was also a roofing contractor, but did framing as well as tile or slating (construction trades/contracting is set up differently in Germany than here) ..

5 pages of posts. Wow. People where talking about the site & context. Here are some pix and diagram of the site context. The site, outlined in red. Ohio River and I-64 directly to the north, Main Street historic district to the south Most of this is parking lots and roadways. The site with some key attractions and features labled. Note that a floodwall seperates the site from Main Street, which has concentration of museums (and also is a bit of an art gallery district and will be getting a new hotel, designed by Deborah Berke...quite a contrast to OMA!) Cross section of the site. Note that flooding issues have a strong effect on what can be done with the riverfront in Louisville...which is why this area is somewhat underdeveloped. Also. the elevated interstate and River road act as barrier between the site and the river. ...and example of high water, showing how floodgates & the floodwall protect the city, but puts the site at risk for flood damage (the red circle is the location of the pix) The solution to the flood issue was to raise most of the riverfront structures on bases of parking garages, which means the river is difficult to reach...the first attempt at riverfront developement put a park and plaza on top of the parking garage, and the interstate, which gave a good view to the river, but no acces (they later built a stair and walkway). So this site is particularly difficult . It is not amenable to some sort of new-urbanist development, and its somewhat seperated from Main Street, too, due to being on the "wrong side" of the floodwall. Yet the renderings so far dont give me much of a clue as to how it is going to be developed. As for the building. It does look like someone took a bunch of Seagram buildings or IBM buildings and sliced, diced, and jumbled them up...I don't understand what is driving the form here and the curtain wall is pretty banal, though I appreicate this is not a conventional skyscraper, as a conventional or deco-revival building (like the Aegeon tower) would not work on this site. And that 20th floor museum and diagonal elevator tube is pretty audacious. The museum-level trusswork reminds me maybe more of Craig Ellwood than the river bridges... Incidentally the last highrised proposed for this site was also an exercise in dramatic form-making, sort of a curtain wall spiral structure by a "name" designer (dont recall the company..it was a Humana spin-off...or the designer).

This is one of the interesting parts of this design.... ...it creates this overhead visual interest, which causes people to figuer out what the heck this is...as sort of a draw (particularly that 20th level museum box, which will be really dramatic at night). Based on the article the plaza is probably intended to be back-circulation to the other museums on Main Street, though I think the diagonal tube is intended to be the main public entry, and it will open up off a small narrow plaza on main street..it looks like they are going to be taking out one of those narrow Main Street buildings to build that plaza... In any case the ground floor treatment is not going to be out of context becuase just behind those older buildings in the pix is a big concrete floodwall, and behind that is a very "engineered" environment of parking garages & lots, and an elevated freeway...there is not much of a context to work with.

Cincinnati came close to having a cutting edge high rise design where that new lazarus is located, across from Fountain Square...I think the architect was going to be Helmut Jahn or someone similar....most of Cincys real good modernist buildings are low rises, though.....that Zaha Hadid design for the Contemporary Arts Center is one of the best recent museums in the US. I'd like to see Zaha do a skyscraper, though, as I think she'd probably do something pretty impressive, based on some of her earlier unbuilt high rise concept desgins. She is probably my favorite of these newer "Neo-Modernists"...I prefer her work over Gehry, Liebskind, etc...she and OMA are my favorites of this style.

I like this park concept, too, the way it turns the high tension line river crossing structure into this giant framework sculpture, which sort of plays off the expressed framework of the tower I also notice from the site plans that that diagonal elevator/escalator thing empties out right on a lot opening onto Main Street, which will tie this in with the other museums on Main. The 20th floor museum/public space is going to be a lot of fun, and pretty dramatic at night, from the freeway....all lit up.

The Cucumber is not by OMA.

Of course we would not be seeing all these negative comments if something this radical was going up in an Ohio city.

There hasn't been any activity at the Schwind site for a long time. It looks like demolition had started, but then stopped. They recently tore down the old house that used to be the rectory for Sacred Heart, and also a 1950s-era building at the corner of Wilkinson and Third. DVAC moved into a remodeled building on Jefferson, between 2nd and 1st. A piano bar is supposed to be opening in the mid-rise across Main from the Victoria.

That was a pretty good history of the Chelsea Hotel. I always knew of this place in the context of the rock subculture or rock scene), but didn't know of it's connection to the earlier bohemian world. Never made the connection between the hotel and the gay scene, though. The closest I came to living in a gay ghetto was in the Old City of Sacramento, which was not really all that gay, but had a real mishmash of people in it, including a sizeable gay community of both poorer and more "yuppie" folks...the so called "Lavender Heights" (sort of a joke as the Old City was at or below sea level). In retrospect I liked feeling of living in a somewhat accepting/tolerant "safe space"...and the streetlife, of running into freinds and aquintances on the street and being able to walk to places from my apartment. As Sacramento was fairly provincial by California standards there wasn't too much of the "S&M" (Stand and Model)/conformist attitude ...the place was more folksy and laid back.

They have roundabouts on steroids in Germany....where if you want to go through, there are tunnels or underpasses under the roundabout.....

I used to think the Ohio Historical Center was one of the better state historical museums until I saw that new Indiana History Museum over on the canal, in Whitewater Park, in Indianapolis. That was a impressive museum (tho there was a bit of an "agenda"...they sort of minimized the labor unions and the fact that one of the great labor leaders came from Indiana), with some impressive exhibit design (designed by the people who did the Holocaust Museum in NYC). The Ohio museum is probably better than the one in KY, which could have been a lot better (using animatronic figures in their displays was pretty lame...probably popular with kids, though.) I do recall the Ohio museum had one industrial display...a woodworking shop with old belt-driven equipment. That was sort of interesting. But also sort of weak given the very major role of industry in the states development (the Youngstown Museum of Industry and Labor, also a OHS museum, does a much better job, though its focused on just the steel industry). But the aboriginal Ohio exhibits where pretty impressive...especially those big terrain models of the mound builder earthworks....I'm not particularly interested in that history but did like the models. Probably one of the big losses due to funding cutbacks was the closure of Ohio Villiage. I actually visited there once, during a Civil War re-enactors event, ate at that restuarant they had on-site. I thought that was one of the better things they had, an open-air museum. I'm not sure how common these are in the US, but open-air historic museums are quite popular in Europe, in Germany and England, at least.

Im suprised to see Louisville on that list.

Agree. Vine shows up pretty clear in the assault map. That cluster you are looking at is at the bottom of the Vine Street hill..where Vine meets McMicken, I think. It looks like there is another clustering going on in the West End (above the "Liberty" label)? Interesting map. There are some patterns there, I think...does anyone else see clustering at or near intersections?

Cant say about Columbus, but the streams and rivers here in the Dayton area are quite a resource and nice natural feature....

Yes, I think that is Liberty. One thing looking at that map, over the course of the year, murders are actually pretty sparse (is this a frequent crime anyway?) but quite a few rapes. I wonder about things like assault , aggregated assault, & 'muggings' (not sure how that would classify). Adding these could give more of a pix as to how "violent" an area is. I recall on a UK message board, there was a lot of finger-pointing at the USA and US cities being these violent murderous places, until a study came out showing that the likelyhood of actually being subjected to or witnessing casual violence...being attacked, mugged, bar fights, etc was higher in Great Britain than in the urban US. So this map and data is sort of interesting in that context...

woah.... but get this.. Did anyone expect to see California and Texas there....I guess this means Ohio is the #1 industrial state in the old "Manufacturing Belt"...the Midwest + Northeast?? Also, interesting to see Columbus still having that strength in manufacturing, 999 plants. I wonder if that guide is available online or in a library somewhere.