atlas

Look to Sydney for ideas on improving the offering. Their yearly Vivid event is a 3-week cultural event. It started as a smaller lights show on the opera house and harbour bridge and quickly turned into a massive event expanding into ‘lights, music and ideas.’ They run cruises on the harbour to get views of the lights from the water. They also have events and talks on fashion, film, urbanism, gallery exhibitions, live music, etc. The main event is and always will be the magical light displays on the Opera House, but as a resident I was more interested in the discussion series. I would avoid the weekends and go during the week after work to avoid the crowds. https://www.vividsydney.com/

hell, I timed coming home to visit family to coincide with this event, so count 2 coming from Delhi, India. Also, my friend who lives in Denver came to town to see it. It has a draw.

Holy sh*t the square is being overtaken by structures and overhangs and pavilions. Also, cutting off access from Walnut is a big mistake. They should be enhancing that connection, not eliminating it. This is what happens when public space design is left in the hands of a bank. I hope, but doubt, this will be rejected.

In Sydney (and London and other places) you just tap your bank card and you’re in. Or your Apple Pay on your phone. You don’t need a special transit card or app. And if you tap off and then tap back on within 30 minutes, you aren’t charged. So going to do a quick grocery run doesn’t cost you double. And I'm not sure if they still do it, but when I was living there, if you rode transit Monday-Friday (to work and back, for example) it was free on the weekends.

closing Elm is a deal breaker. Move it to Queensgate. I’m sure land is cheap as chips there.

It’s an actual crime.

The big differences between what’s happening at the Gantry in Northside (which the Artistry is a slightly improved version of) or other similar projects and many of the Short North / Arena District projects is ground floor treatment and urban cadence. In C-Bus they seem to represent the ‘city at eye level’ principles more than what projects like The Artistry do. They tend to articulate vertically, have good masonry/window opening ratios on the ground floor, have a lot of brick, avoid long horizontal lines and don’t feature as many dead walls. This is a general sense and of course C-Bus has some lame projects like the rest of the world. With The Artistry, i care less about the ‘what it looks like’ than how it works in an urban sense. Is it contributing to a walkable city? Does the ground floor contribute to eyes on the street? The Artistry needs a lot of work at the ground floor. And for the love of god can we get some height difference? This is a massive lot and they can afford to punch up another few floors at one of the corners before having to go podium/tower.

Isn’t that the problem? Cincinnati’s getting the same stuff in downtown that it’s getting in Clifton in Cincy / University District in Columbus. From what I can tell (I’m not in Ohio so I’m just a voyeur), aside from some infill in OTR, Columbus is getting better outcomes in Short North and Arena District than anywhere in Cincinnati. The newly designed soccer stadiums if each city are a good example - in my view, the urban design/street level design of the Crew stadium is far superior to that of FC.

Disagree. Columbus tends to get significantly better design outcomes from infill in their prime central city locations. It is all about how sophisticated local design culture is. The city could use an apartment design guide of some sorts to at least ensure some elements of better design are achieved. As for this project, have we seen a site plan or any renderings from the river side? Is it integrating with the trail? How is the parking being done? From the one render, it appears parking will be underground or built within the building, which is better than Skyhouse’s stand along garage, but it’s tough to tell without more detail. Scouring the internet doesn’t provide lots of information, which is never a good sign...

It is a good problem to have. Perhaps if surrounding N-S streets were converted to 2-way, that would assist.

Exactly. 4-storeys is fine for the old width of Liberty Street, but not the current width. If I were the folks putting together the proposal, I'd dig up old photos of Liberty Street pre-widening and figure out the building height to street width ratio of the corridor. It's probably something like 2:1. Then I'd figure out what building height achieves the same ratio with today's widened road. It'd probably be 7-8 stories, if not more. If all building have to maintain this 4-storey limit, but keep the current width of Liberty Street, it will always feel more wide than tall and limit it from ever becoming a 'place' like it once was. This notion that building height should be the primary thing driving preservation misses out on so many other aspects of urban design that create great spaces and provide enclosure that makes OTR walkable and feel like a giant outdoor living room.

Yikes. What a sad outcome. That thing needs to be stopped.

The main reason this has sat vacant is because the floor plate is on the smaller side for new Class A tenants these days. Smaller floor plates work in other parts of town, but this being the central business district, most tenants that want to go here want bigger floor plates.

College Hill seems like a logical spot. It has a semi-attractive NBD with some ‘been there for years’ small businessss and lots of potential. It already seems to be happening a bit, I thought....?

When he started shaming homeless/folks with addiction issues by filming them, patronizing them and posting it on his feed, I stopped following him and never looked back. I found him toxic.

The ingredients for walkability aren’t big single use buildings serviced by big parking garages taking up entire blocks that are next to wide roads with high speeds. It’s diversity of built form, many uses, serviced by transit in human scale.

Wow. Great update and set. So nice to see so much positive change in OTR and DT. But man, I gotta say, that new Kroger building is not one of those. Thank goodness it'll have that long chased grocery store, but, yikes, that paneling/massive parking garage/flat facade - it is a blight. And a big F U to Central Pkwy. Tell me it is better in person...

Vine Street in OTR actually could use tons of bump outs, raised crossings, ped priority lighting, which you can install without ripping up the curb. I’d start there honestly. Just keep stormwater running as is and build an island out, with a metal grate covering the existing storm water drainage. See the bump out and metal grate example in the link below. https://goo.gl/maps/uRMMmLAtUXT2

Pedestrian malls CAN work wonderfully, if there is already a lot of foot traffic and latent demand for more pedestrian space. They shouldn’t be put just anywhere. This was the mistake of the past - thinking a random physical design could just attract the people. Instead, best practice today follows the behavior of people first and designs accordingly. This notion that pedestrian only streets don’t work full stop isn’t true. Philly is putting in new pedestrian only alleyways, every Australian city has countless pedestrian only lanes, many of which command the highest rent/sf in the Southern Hemisphere, of course New York now has jumped on the bandwagon, big parts of Central European cities are ped only, etc. If they’re going to be redoing Court St then sure, make improvements, but in general Cincinnati should identify the streets where the most pedestrians already are and make those the best pedestrian experience possible. And then see where the bottlenecks are (like Central Parkway at Main). This will build momentum and give the political evidence needed to do it elsewhere.

It looks exactly like what I would expect a gay bar to look like. Super camp and over the top tacky/cheesy. This is done on purpose.

Well, yea. LA Metro is more dense than NY metro but to best of my knowledge LA proper isn’t more dense than NYC. It is the same effect, essentially.

Ok, but it doesn't take too much creativity to make a convention space work and have sleeved retail, just like Class A office buildings that get their big floorplates and still provide fine grain retail shops on the ground floor. Sydney's new convention center has ground floor cafes facing the park that it sits on. It isn't 'best practice' but it is at least moving towards activating what would otherwise be dull spaces. https://www.google.com/maps/[/member]-33.8750228,151.2009625,3a,75y,209.57h,88.02t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipM1B6uGZQCZDZZVZR1hrtuf2q9aV9WInbJEs3gc!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipM1B6uGZQCZDZZVZR1hrtuf2q9aV9WInbJEs3gc%3Dw203-h100-k-no-pi-0-ya53.734867-ro-0-fo100!7i8704!8i4352 Why won't the link work? When I 'preview' it works fine. Any insight?

Ok, but it doesn't take too much creativity to make a convention space work and have sleeved retail, just like Class A office buildings that get their big floorplates and still provide fine grain retail shops on the ground floor. Sydney's new convention center has ground floor cafes facing the park that it sits on. It isn't 'best practice' but it is at least moving towards activating what would otherwise be dull spaces. https://www.google.com/maps/[/member]-33.8750228,151.2009625,3a,75y,209.57h,88.02t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipM1B6uGZQCZDZZVZR1hrtuf2q9aV9WInbJEs3gc!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipM1B6uGZQCZDZZVZR1hrtuf2q9aV9WInbJEs3gc%3Dw203-h100-k-no-pi-0-ya53.734867-ro-0-fo100!7i8704!8i4352

The convention center would do a lot of good to activate its perimeter. Sleeving retail in key locations would help. I never understood why it is seen as a given that convention centers have to be big boxes with no street activation. A lot of CBD destination retailers still offer great window displays/art installations that are quite interactive. This would also help.

So many beautiful photos. Cincinnati is such a photogenic city. Unfortunately these photos capture how eerily underpopulated the streets are. Where are the people?!