Civvik

OMG that's classic.

"...but a skyscraper does not make a city." There are many city builders who would argue that in fact skyscrapers make cities worse.

Inspired by the hues in the ball park and the freedom center? Not all celebrity babies are as beautiful as their parents... At least that rendering has the hideous office tower portion back to being an amorphous white box.

I'm hungry. :(

Are you still resurrecting the old thread?

Have you thought about insurance costs?

Something like Megabus? In the sense that Megabus is new (2006), is express only, and tries to undercut Greyhound. http://www.megabus.com/us/stops/index_midwest.php

I think it will depend on the block. They will be discrete from the street of course. The phase one block appears to have a 3 or 4 level interior garage based on the rendering.

What is a "racist?" Is it someone who thinks that certain races are inferior to others, or someone who wants the races to be separate? Would that more accurately be a racial separatist?

I have some time to help clean the Banks thread. Msg me.

Is it just me, or does the blue stuff protecting the curtain wall panels look like the stuff you peel off of a new dishwasher?

He seemed pretty specific to me...LOL

It was a mess in the renderings. But time will tell...

Population density is always a factor. Barcelona's is 40,000 people per square mile. Columbus's is 3,400. That means you have ten times as many people in a given area looking for something to do. You can fill up big spaces in America, but you can rarely fill them up all the time, or even some of the time. Transit is also probably required. But I'm not even going to go there. Here is the first thing that came to mind when I saw this site. (Sorry, I did this in 10 minutes.) This opens up Town Street (I would think that would be critical) and activates a plaza in a lot of different ways. I guess it's kind of what you'd get in Fountain Square, now that I think about it. Funny how it's almost the same as the previous version of the actual plan. :

Fountain Square in Cincy is a great example of that. The foot traffic from the shops gove organizations a huge incentive to plan events in a public space like that as well. Then lots of activity in the park at night lead to extended business hours which is definitely something downtown Columbus could use. I think Columbus Commons has the potential to be even more busy and vibrant than Fountain Square. The vast majority of Fountain Square's daytime traffic is office workers, with the evening and weekend mix being restaurant patrons and people attending cultural events. It is also directly activated on two sides by the most important streets in downtown Cincinnati. It has been the iconic center of the city for a century and at a mere 200 by 200 feet, Fountain Square is arguably the only true urban plaza for 2.2 million people. Yet even still, it is heavily programmed through 3CDC coordination to keep people actively using the space. Come to think of it, there are only two "shops" that face the square at all...Macy's and the greeting card store inside the Westin. Anyhow, I'm not saying that this thing couldn't feel like Fountain Square, or any square, but it's not the same set of circumstances AT ALL. I really don't mean to be pissing on anyone's ideas, either. In fact, if you wanted to make this thing act anything like Fountain Square in Cincinnati, you would want to cut the site into about four blocks, and put a 200x200-ish plaza right up onto High Street at the southwest corner of the site. And surround it with 30 story buildings. You would also want to control the future of the western, southern and southwestern blocks adjacent, so they could develop and activate the site as well.

I do see what you are thinking about the piazza thing. Two issues with that. One, good streets aren't barriers, they are blood vessels. "The street will block this off" is largely an instinct developed over decades of bladerunner-style 8-lane road projects. Second, this is Ohio. Our cities don't have the population density to support piazzas, and even if they did, most paved open spaces in Europe are actually quite small! Only the most massive and well-known are more than a city block. This plaza in Barcelona comes to mind when I think of a nice Spanish example: But here is a scaled comparison of the mall site, and this very grand Spanish plaza:

Thanks for the summary. I do remember them talking about this in the 90's. I even went to this mall exclusively my freshman year, then to Easton exclusively after that. I hammered my own little nail into THAT coffin. Turning chunks of downtown into "park" is sadly just the market letting something go fallow. Literally. But even THAT isn't so bad if you plan for a decent block structure to emerge from the fallow land whenever the market demands construction. But I don't see that anywhere in this plan. It's just a superblock.

To justify high rise construction land values need to be at a premium, and when you look around 95% of American cities you'll notice downtowns that are littered with surface lots (least productive use of developed land). Many of these will sit right next to a 30 or 40 story building which should make one scratch their head and ask why that happens. In places where land values are legitimately high enough to support high rise construction you won't see this wasted land and building climb higher out of necessity. It's a lot more complicated than that.

I would add another one in there that is a bit more...ephemeral. Topography and urban fabric. Cincinnatians tend to live psychologically within a couple-mile radius of their neighborhood, where straying too far on even a main thoroughfare will take you deep into exotic territory that might be full of danger. Crossing the mill creek viaduct. Ending up in Madisonville. Wandering out of Wyoming. You get the point. That may sound like humor, but it has a very real impact on your willingness to take risk.

Would you prefer that we not receive federal aide for a transit hub? Yes, actually, I for one would DEFINITELY prefer we NOT receive good money thrown after bad. What we NEED is a comprehensive change in the way that transit is prioritized, planned and funded at every level of government. Think bigger.

In Cincinnati it was honestly just a big dose of modernization of older office building stock, mixed with the real estate boom of the early 80's.

As an outsider looking in who is not very familiar with the evolution of this project (so you have been warned), I can't say I'm very impressed. Looks like a missed opportunity. Someone totally missed the message on "urban open spaces need active edges." In the late 90's when I moved from Cincinnati to Columbus for college, I felt like the city had totally eclipsed Cincinnati in sophistication and development potential. This project though...wow. I don't even know what to say. It's like having a very good student turn in crap one day.

I actually did that in Chicago all the time. I could see the meeting room across the gap between the buildings. It was kind of cool.

Aww, I almost got it dead-on!

We don't pay a seperate premium for each of our kids, we simply pay a premium for family plan. Well...yeah. Therein lies the curiosity of not being able to leverage actuarial data for kids who engage in higher-risk activities.