chrino21

Been away for awhile. Is this building still sitting empty?

I'm pretty critical of Cleveland in a number of ways, but I don't think the skyline is any worse than other mid-sized cities. It has good views and bad, like every city. From the swing bridge, the shoreway bridge, Ohio City/WSM, Tremont, the Inner Harbor, Lakewood, even coming in on the east shoreway as you pass Burke, they're all pretty interesting alignments from a design element standpoint. Plus, like any bigger city, each one looks quite different from the other.

I've been curious for a while - since those colored lights are in or near the recessed strip, will they NOT be visible from an angle (like from Progressive Field or the southwest)? If that's the case, it would be a shame, though I guess they'd "appear" as you moved past the building. Just wonderin'...

@Mov2Ohio Wow, that is one icy-cold style parking garage. It's gonna be brutal-looking in winter gray.

I'll contribute - this seemed like an appropriate place to park my car for a Gary Numan concert in Berkeley a while back... Changing colors and lights. The other side is dayglo lime green.

I know SW looks a good bit like the Hilton, but @MayDay's photos show there's some Ernst & Young DNA in there as well.

Very good discussion with great observations for and against. Good stuff everybody!

I'm still pretty underwhelmed, tbh. I think it looks VERY similar to buildings built in the 1970's (John Hancock in Boston, Owens+Illinois in Toledo), and I was never really a huge fan of that style. Pickard Chilton's website shows a long list of underwhelming buildings in this style, that all look like they belong on a Columbus outerbelt. I judge these things by how long I could sit, stare, and get lost in the building. The other big three on Public Square can keep my attention for hours, with their setbacks, corners, angles, details, and design. SW? About 30 seconds. I'm also more of a fan of actually lighting the structure (to show off the design), rather than bolting lights onto the outside just for show (feels more like a sign than a lit building). I mean my God, look at the Terminal Tower at night. Majestic. Also, there are some ugly angles and viewpoints to this building - more than any other Cleveland highrise. Being that tall, I wish it looked good from all angles, but it's beautifully slim from some directions, and chunky and fat from others. That being said, I tell myself SW has more of a sense of humor than I thought, and boldly delivered two paintbrushes, and that keeps me from hating it.

@KJP I wonder if it would be cheaper to jack up the Hilton and roll it down the street as Building Two, then build Hilton a new Justice Center II? Ya gotta keep an open mind and come up with creative solutions when urban planning!

@JohnSummit Indeed, it is mind-bending and problematic. Seriously, back in the day I wrote a fairly blistering critique/letter of the proposed Ameritrust Tower, which the PD printed and actually quoted to the architect during a later interview. He laughed it off as a compliment, which it clearly wasn't. I was glad at the time it didn't get built, but have softened just a tiny bit since. If you want to see it in action, they ended up building something very similar in Sydney (Chifley Tower), which I always thought looked dated and unimpressive.

With thanks to @originaljbw for their awesome pic, I took a tiny bit of that, added a historical rendering (artist unknown), and came up with this. Woulda been pretty cool...

Here are a few shots (courtesy of google maps) of a relatively new parking garage in the neighborhood where I work in SF. It's not the same as you can see - the retail is built right into the floor-level of the garage for instance, but it's quite an attractive addition considering that it replaced a filthy, surface pit parking (and drug-shooting) lot. There is a gourmet coffee shop, a Subway, and a bargain-priced gourmet vegetarian Thai food lunch spot, all of which are packed in the morning and at lunchtime, and must offset the financial loss of those missing parking spots. You could do a lot worse than this for a parking garage (this one even has some greenery dangling from the top level), but I'm still hoping for a warehouse-looking front that is more substantial, like the rendering above.

Jeez, to be stuck with a medium-sized office building while growing quickly doesn't seem to be a great place to be at the moment. Maybe they sell the whole thing to Progressive, Cleveland Cliffs, or The Clinic, and just start over.

Looking at the very edge of @Mov2Ohio's second picture, I realize how cool the ill-fated Medi-Mart-Mall thing (or whatever they call it now) would have looked as a 40-story building.

While I'm at it...