8 minutes ago, neilworms said:

I still wonder why someone can't recreate a building like this (with a just a bit less detailing), hollywood set designers can do it architects can too

 

Because this would be incredibly dishonest from an architectural standpoint. In most historic districts, stuff like this wouldn't even get past the HCB due to the Secretary of Interior's guidelines.

It's not that hard.  Just copy what works. 

 

Edited January 3, 20196 yr by jmecklenborg

2 minutes ago, Largue said:

 

Because this would be incredibly dishonest from an architectural standpoint.

 

 

The only people who care are architects.  Developers don't care.  The public doesn't care. 

 

People want a nice place to live and work and architects won't give them what they want.  It's like forcing people to listen to free jazz and experimental music when people want to listen to what they want. 

 

 

Edited January 3, 20196 yr by jmecklenborg

3 minutes ago, jmecklenborg said:

The only people who care are architects

 

And anyone who cares about history..? When people walking around in historic districts can't even tell the old from the new, that deeply detracts from the character of the neighborhood.

Edited January 3, 20196 yr by Largue

5 minutes ago, Largue said:

 

Because this would be incredibly dishonest from an architectural standpoint. In most historic districts, stuff like this wouldn't even get past the HCB due to the Secretary of Interior's guidelines.

 

I never got that argument.  Its one thing to argue that we don't have the craftsmen we used to, but why  the hell is there a problem with honesty?

https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1090878,-84.5133272,3a,60y,42.24h,90.08t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1ssrtIbhcBGgEENrFSWhm3Eg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

 

This is a prime example of poorly replicating historic buildings...

10 minutes ago, Largue said:

 

And anyone who cares about history..? When people walking around in historic districts can't even tell the old from the new, that deeply detracts from the character of the neighborhood.

 

I think its better to have something cohesive that can be consistently marketed to a public at large.   I post pics of Cincinnati to a national urbanist group on facebook and get utter astonishment at what they are looking at because most people don't even know a city with Cincinnati's caliber of historic architecture even exists in the Midwest.   This is stuff you guys can leverage, but for some reason don't know how to when the pictures sell themselves!

 

Its frustrating though when you see infill and its very low end stuff, you've seen better infill elsewhere but so much of Cincinnati is just grateful to have development when they can do better.

2 minutes ago, Largue said:

https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1090878,-84.5133272,3a,60y,42.24h,90.08t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1ssrtIbhcBGgEENrFSWhm3Eg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

 

This is a prime example of poorly replicating historic buildings...

 

I actually overall don't mind these, I have a few nitpicks here and there but feel like that captures the feel of what OTR was.

 

If you are going to go modern then do something that references the old and plays around with it without messing it up too much, Quan Happa's building for instance is a really good example of that:

 

19 minutes ago, Largue said:

https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1090878,-84.5133272,3a,60y,42.24h,90.08t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1ssrtIbhcBGgEENrFSWhm3Eg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

 

This is a prime example of poorly replicating historic buildings...

 

This is Brackett Village and I think it is excellent. This is fine grained affordable housing fit expertly into the neighborhood. For example, the house at 14th and Walnut has entrances and a balcony incredibly intimate with the street and sidewalk and it is honestly one of my favorite buildings in OTR. 

 

I’m pro-faux, if that’s the style you want to do. Or at least I think the guideline in the OTR historic guidelines to “pay homage to, but not mimic” is  pretentious hogwash that breaks down into complete gibberish when you think about it for any length of time. It’s setting up some imaginary fine line to walk that doesn’t need to be there at all. Give me fine details and elaborate cornices! (If your project can afford it)

Edited January 3, 20196 yr by thebillshark

But I don't understand the logic behind making everything new look faux historic. How far do you take it? Every new building must mimic an old one? Well, traffic lights didn't exist in 1880s, time to go back to stop signs to make the street look more authentic. And streets weren't paved back then, time to bring back the Belgian block. And now let's talk about the types of businesses occupying the first floor retail spaces, and make sure they're authentic to the time period...

 

Cities aren't museums. They are living, growing, changing places. One of my favorite things about cities is seeing historic and modern elements juxtaposed. I'm fine with requiring new buildings to keep the form of old ones, but requiring them to copy the historic architectural details is ridiculous.

Wow.  With all do respect, I think that Quan Happa Building is one of the greatest atrocities in OTR.  

7 minutes ago, CincyIntheKnow said:

Wow.  With all do respect, I think that Quan Happa Building is one of the greatest atrocities in OTR.  

 

Yeah, what's weird is that the interiors of many of the early 3CDC condos had curved walls and even curved glass block.  Some had odd curved interior ventilation or just pure decoration.  It's as if the guy who was responsible for all of that curved 1/4" drywall came up with the curved turret and the railings that look like they belong on a circa-1992 cue line for a McDonald's playland.   

I think it just comes down to the materials (and a couple other things like lot setbacks) more than anything else. Look at this tenement building on Broadway:

 

https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1093203,-84.5082896,3a,75y,104.37h,106.9t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1shrAQi0_9qLwQdgC9Pv_u1Q!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

 

It's literally just a long brick box that lacks a cornice or any level of detailing. It really isn't functionally any different from Brackett Village, other than it lacks the latter's admittedly out-of-place stoops. If you get the height right and use a high quality brick (or whatever other cladding you want, I'm not picky), it should turn out looking fine. Most of the basin's vernacular is just brick boxes with varying degree of detail on the lintels and cornices. I don't personally find it "dishonest" if you slap a fancy cornice on top if you feel like it (so long as it's not made out of EIFS or something), or you put a modern looking metal cornice or no cornice at all. It's quite literally just window dressing. 

 

The thing about the Secretary of the Interior's standards is that they are fundamentally in conflict.  The central premise is that new buildings (and additions) should be "of their time" but also "compatible" with their surroundings (contextual), or in effect "of their place."  The thing is, you can't really do both, because much modern design is non-contextual or even anti-contextual.  There's a razor-thin intersection between them on the spectrum of design, and there are some examples out there that work, but more often than not you get the watered-down architectural equivalent of a crossover SUV that's neither a good car nor a good truck.

 

The standards first came out of the National Historic Preservation Act of the 1960s when architecture was highly influenced by International Style modernists.  The "of their time" language in the standards comes directly from modernist doctrine.  In part this was to distance the movement from the vernacular, which is precisely what a lot of historical buildings are examples of.  Sure at the most blunt level the standards say that new buildings shouldn't be made to look old through the addition of fake patina or accelerated aging, but it allows neither contrasting modernism nor truly authentic reproduction either.  What we generally see are modernist designs beaten into more traditional forms, especially through the insistence that all windows are punched openings, or we get cheaply done half-assed attempts at vaguely historical cartoon buildings. 

 

Regarding massing, the old SCPA is a brilliant example of how to do a monumental building.  It is out of scale with its surroundings, but only for its lack of granularity.  Its height is not even 2x its surroundings which is really not a big deal.  The important thing to understand is that as a monumental public building, its design attention was ramped up to the maximum, and it was given a prominent location occupying an entire block.  These "art object" type structures are the ones that get the full block, the podium, and the setbacks, but they're also held to the highest standards of design and beauty.

I also want to note that Brackett Village doesn't need cornices to be accurate to the vernacular.   Its really paying homage more to federalist style rowhouses that are dotted throughout the neighborhood that predate the large Italianate buildings that were built as Cincinnati increased to its maximum density.

 

I'm generally okay with a mix of old and new buildings, but in Cincinnati the contrast is so huge in quality, and given Cincinnati's cultural/economic importance now vs its golden age its not going to get the best infill in the world.   I'm less frustrated with the infill situation in Chicago for instance because a lot of the new stuff is of significantly better quality due to economics and architectural pedigree of the city than it is in Cincinnati and the vernacular in victorian neighborhoods in Chicago also tends to be a lot plainer too.

Edited January 3, 20196 yr by neilworms

I believe that this strip along E. Clifton is also part of "Bracket Village":

https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1163875,-84.5150496,3a,75y,75.45h,97.51t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sd_Ate3l5npGULJBWbuogVA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

 

The main reason why these buildings stand out is because the brick doesn't match the sort of brick & mortar that was used 100 years earlier.  There is no impression of a demolished building on the side, either, or maybe a ghost sign.  There is no indication of separate ownership of the different buildings, because it has always been owned by the same entity. 

 

That's why the "broken-up" massing of large apartment buildings doesn't work, even if they paint the different sections different colors.  Over time individual buildings are painted and repaired and have their windows replaced in different ways.  A large building has it all done at once. 

 

Out in the 1950s-1960s suburbs we've now had enough time to where similar home types have been repaired in different ways at different times.  There a lot of personality creeping into those 50 year-old places now.  The homes are being used in different ways by different types of families than those who built them.  That's when an area starts becoming interesting -- when structures successfully take on new uses.  Some are subtle, some are dramatic .

 

At Christmas I drove down North Bend Rd. in Mt. Airy with my brother who has lived elsewhere for 20 years.  He remarked at how much character that formerly nondescript road dotted with buildings built between 1930 and 1970 is now. 

Edited January 3, 20196 yr by jmecklenborg

I think the compressed floor heights also make them stand out, which is another problem that seems to plague any of the single-family houses that have popped up in the neighborhood recently. People tend to describe OTR and Pendleton as "rowhouse neighborhoods", but they're really tenement neighborhoods and most of the buildings have 11-12 foot stories instead of your standard 8-10 foot stories you more regularly see in single-family houses or townhomes. So you end up with townhomes pretending to be tenements, and the massing is off just enough for it to be really obvious. 

2 hours ago, BigDipper 80 said:

I think the compressed floor heights also make them stand out, which is another problem that seems to plague any of the single-family houses that have popped up in the neighborhood recently. People tend to describe OTR and Pendleton as "rowhouse neighborhoods", but they're really tenement neighborhoods and most of the buildings have 11-12 foot stories instead of your standard 8-10 foot stories you more regularly see in single-family houses or townhomes. So you end up with townhomes pretending to be tenements, and the massing is off just enough for it to be really obvious. 

 

Its kind of amazing how blind people are to the urbanism that's right in front of them...

I'll jump into the foray for a sec. See avatar for qualifications.

 

One of the many reasons architects have great disdain for historicized architecture is that it does nothing to push the field further and definitely does not recognize progress made in the field. Imagine a car company knowing everything they do about new methods of efficiency, safety, structures, etc, and still creating something that looked like a Model T just because the consumer liked the way it looked. Architecture has moved on from the materials and methods from the 1860's. When we design something historicized, it's a lie. It's a Model T for a body, but a Toyota Camry under the hood. Except.. we actually aren't allowed to design you a REAL Model T body because it doesn't pass safety tests (code), it's materials are inefficient (no need too over structure things), you can't afford the cost of the craftsmanship (there is no longer slavery/child labor/7 day work week/or a middle class clientele for architecture) and countless other things that make your car a joke.

 

Architecture tells of the tone and tenor of the time in which it was built. The Contemporary Arts Center, Union Terminal, Music Hall, and Old St. Mary's are each monuments for their own time, but are built using the technology that was at its peak at the time of construction. Domestic architecture can do the same. Walking down the street you can read the progressive story of humanity in an urban place. Do I think greater efforts need to be made to be contemporarily contextual? Yes! Do I get exhausted when architects try to make flamboyant contemporary gestures to make their domestic buildings stand out? YES! Are architecture budgets for most multi-family project clients ever big enough to accommodate quality material and detailing? NO! (VERY RARELY!) A more sensitive approach to this problem is a clever, non-ostentatious attitude toward infill. There are good projects in OTR and Downtown that do this. I don't have to tell anyone that.

 

We must tell the future that we too (people of the oughts and teens and twenties) were ambitious, creative, innovative, tasteful people. fin.

 

^This is my best effort to summarize a lifetime love and a decade for formal education and practice of architecture. Shit... i just tried to qualify my statement when I told myself not to qualify my statement. Dammit. 

See below for a great modern cornice (150 Wooster in SoHo). We might not have access to skilled labor like we used to, but we do have access to laser and plasma cutters as well as CNC routers. We just need to get more creative with our profiles and stop attempting to emulate the past.

16 hours ago, Chas Wiederhold said:

I'll jump into the foray for a sec. See avatar for qualifications.

 

One of the many reasons architects have great disdain for historicized architecture is that it does nothing to push the field further and definitely does not recognize progress made in the field. Imagine a car company knowing everything they do about new methods of efficiency, safety, structures, etc, and still creating something that looked like a Model T just because the consumer liked the way it looked. Architecture has moved on from the materials and methods from the 1860's. When we design something historicized, it's a lie. It's a Model T for a body, but a Toyota Camry under the hood. Except.. we actually aren't allowed to design you a REAL Model T body because it doesn't pass safety tests (code), it's materials are inefficient (no need too over structure things), you can't afford the cost of the craftsmanship (there is no longer slavery/child labor/7 day work week/or a middle class clientele for architecture) and countless other things that make your car a joke.

 

Architecture tells of the tone and tenor of the time in which it was built. The Contemporary Arts Center, Union Terminal, Music Hall, and Old St. Mary's are each monuments for their own time, but are built using the technology that was at its peak at the time of construction. Domestic architecture can do the same. Walking down the street you can read the progressive story of humanity in an urban place. Do I think greater efforts need to be made to be contemporarily contextual? Yes! Do I get exhausted when architects try to make flamboyant contemporary gestures to make their domestic buildings stand out? YES! Are architecture budgets for most multi-family project clients ever big enough to accommodate quality material and detailing? NO! (VERY RARELY!) A more sensitive approach to this problem is a clever, non-ostentatious attitude toward infill. There are good projects in OTR and Downtown that do this. I don't have to tell anyone that.

 

We must tell the future that we too (people of the oughts and teens and twenties) were ambitious, creative, innovative, tasteful people. fin.

 

^This is my best effort to summarize a lifetime love and a decade for formal education and practice of architecture. Shit... i just tried to qualify my statement when I told myself not to qualify my statement. Dammit. 

 

I appreciate the sentiment of this post, and I agree that there are myriad practical reasons why we can’t or don’t build buildings today like we did in the early 20th century. But I think your claims about architecture needing to prove that people of this day are also innovative and what not is a bit overblown. Is this not what motivated planners in the era of urban renewal? Sometimes you have to acknowledge that something flat out works, and doesn’t need to be innovated or changed too much. In planning, think of simple organizational principles like the grid. LeCorb and Co tried to innovate away from known models, and while I admire their ideas and creativity, the end product was pretty disastrous. Looking at average buildings in the modern era compared to those of the past, I’m not convinced architecture is really progressing in the ways that cars/planes/computers have. Engineering and architecture innovation hav allowed us to build incredibly tall and beautiful buildings, but on average, it seems newer buildings are not built to last nearly as long, and look significantly worse than buildings of the past. 

Consider the Duck-Billed Platypus, a hodgepodge of parts created by Gaia that we are surprised by but accept fully. Architecture happens in time and space. Styles change, tastes change but in the long run, we enjoy surprise and uniqueness. Whether in OTR or the Banks what people will remember is the odd duck. That's what a great city has; surprise and uniqueness. 

Just to add my two cents to this discussion because I think its really interesting. 

 

Cincinnati and OTR in particular is in a really unique position of having a plethora of historic architecture and (sadly) a lot of vacant lots in-between those historic buildings. Those vacant lots sort of worry me. Agreeing with a poster above, I think we should utilize modern architecture of the time and celebrate past architecture by complimenting it with said modern architecture. Barcelona, Spain does this really well. Im afraid Cincinnati is going to try and continue replicating historic architecture with cheap materials and a lack of context next to beautiful historic homes. This could really be a wet blanket in terms of OTR being just another neighborhood that's kinda cool or a true gem on a national scale. I really hope OTR and Cincinnati as a whole makes the correct move and gets the notoriety it deserves. 

Right, as I was writing this post I was thinking of Barcelona and Gaudi. A beautiful city that has many different styles of architecture  all about 6 stories tall. 

 

On 1/3/2019 at 2:01 PM, neilworms said:

 

I still wonder why someone can't recreate a building like this (with a just a bit less detailing), hollywood set designers can do it architects can too: 

 

This also is an example of a non fine grain building that was built in the age of small lot sizes.  A few of these done right won't hurt.

 

Las Vegas, New Mexico for the win! (I went to high school there and have many fond memories of dinners at the Plaza Hotel).

On 1/4/2019 at 2:19 PM, edale said:

 

I appreciate the sentiment of this post, and I agree that there are myriad practical reasons why we can’t or don’t build buildings today like we did in the early 20th century. But I think your claims about architecture needing to prove that people of this day are also innovative and what not is a bit overblown. Is this not what motivated planners in the era of urban renewal? Sometimes you have to acknowledge that something flat out works, and doesn’t need to be innovated or changed too much. In planning, think of simple organizational principles like the grid. LeCorb and Co tried to innovate away from known models, and while I admire their ideas and creativity, the end product was pretty disastrous. Looking at average buildings in the modern era compared to those of the past, I’m not convinced architecture is really progressing in the ways that cars/planes/computers have. Engineering and architecture innovation hav allowed us to build incredibly tall and beautiful buildings, but on average, it seems newer buildings are not built to last nearly as long, and look significantly worse than buildings of the past. 

 

Our physical environments are one of the most important legacies we leave to future generations. Much of anthropological research comes from studying the structures left behind from long gone civilizations. Not all of Corb's ideas were disastrous. Not all of Vitruvius' or Palladio's stand the test of time. The research builds on itself over time and we've got to be contextually critical of it. 

 

Just because a building LOOKS like it was built in 1860 does not mean that it was built the same way. It's still a stick built building constructed in 2019 with styrofoam details, brick veneer, and tile in the bathroom with a printed vinyl texture on it that makes it look like you are bathing in a marble bathtub (you're not). Sure, the optics might be nice for people who want to convince themselves that they live in an intact historic district that was never threatened by abandonment and disinvestment, but in a few years, someone or something is going to punch a hole in a brick veneer facade and you're going to see a bunch of green foam underneath and realize how cheap and thin Disneyland/Las Vegas really is. 

 

What I appreciate about these new buildings is they at least are expressing how little the developers care about material and details. Material and details cut away from profits and if you are getting any form of government subsidy from the building, you'll be selling it after 17 years anyway... so why use material that lasts any longer than that. TBH, I find it more and more ridiculous that architects even claim/defend/apologize for these buildings when we know well that if the developers valued quality over $quantity$ then we likely would not be having this discussion at all.

 

12 hours ago, jwulsin said:

 

Las Vegas, New Mexico for the win! (I went to high school there and have many fond memories of dinners at the Plaza Hotel).

 

That was totally a luck of the draw for me, I was looking for larger Italianate structures on image search and came across that.   I'll add that town to my list of places to check out.

10 hours ago, neilworms said:

 

That was totally a luck of the draw for me, I was looking for larger Italianate structures on image search and came across that.   I'll add that town to my list of places to check out.

Lol. Las Vegas NM doesn’t get a lot of tourists but those who make the trek usually are quite charmed. 

A question for the architects on this board: At what point does a building's design move from being "faux historic" to being "XYZ Revival" architecture? Is the Collegiate Gothic of Yale's campus less valid and honest as an architectural form because it copies 800 year old ecclesiastical architecture for dorms and classrooms? What about the Tudor revival downtown buildings in Mariemont? Not trying to be snarky, I'm just trying to better understand where the line lies between "acceptable" and "unacceptable" when translating older forms of architecutre. Is it about context, since both college campuses and places like Mariemont are somewhat self-contained, unlike an OTR-type setting? 

19 minutes ago, BigDipper 80 said:

A question for the architects on this board: At what point does a building's design move from being "faux historic" to being "XYZ Revival" architecture? Is the Collegiate Gothic of Yale's campus less valid and honest as an architectural form because it copies 800 year old ecclesiastical architecture for dorms and classrooms? What about the Tudor revival downtown buildings in Mariemont? Not trying to be snarky, I'm just trying to better understand where the line lies between "acceptable" and "unacceptable" when translating older forms of architecutre. Is it about context, since both college campuses and places like Mariemont are somewhat self-contained, unlike an OTR-type setting? 

 

Mariemont gives off a "theme park" vibe because it's obvious that the entire town square was built by the same entity. 

 

Meanwhile, the new business school at UC looks like it came out of 1971.  Like the nursing school before it was renovated. 

 

 

 

 

 

Miami University is a pretty good local example to me. They use the same exact brick that they have always used since the turn of the 20th century and in many ways it's hard to tell which buildings were built in the 1930s and which were built 5 years ago (with the exception of Western Campus). Faux-historic to me implies cheapness or fakeness. Miami has done a good job of using original brick, using carved stone instead of pre-cast, using copper roofs and flashing instead of EPDM or something cheaper etc. If you spend the money to use actual historic materials, even if assembled in a modern construction, like your example of Yale or my lesser example of Miami, the faux history feels more legitimate.

 

In OTR it's more difficult for many reasons, but the two biggest ones are 1. Cost per square foot (as opposed to an extremely well funded university) and 2. because of direct adjacency to exemplary historic architecture. To keep the example of Miami, even if you like McGuffey Hall more than Armstrong, they don't physically touch like buildings in OTR do and are separated by enough physical space and landscaping that direct comparisons are more difficult. 

OU vs. Miami is a study in contrasts so far as going all-in with new buildings in historic styles.  Miami and Oxford are a little too "perfect" which sucks the personality out of the place, whereas OU and Athens are defiantly shaggy around the edges.  Miami and Oxford suffer from the same problem as Mariemont -- it looks like it's all under the same ownership. 

 

Meanwhile, I walked from Spring Grove Village to Clifton Heights yesterday and walked through the UC campus from Bishop St.  The new business school and new dorm that replaced the demolished third sister are complete duds.   Not only are the buildings dull and outdated, there is still no solid acknowledgement of what fragments of the original street layout that remain on the campus. 

 

The real strength of OU's campus is that it never had some radical rework where they tried to kick cars completely off campus and so ended up with a bunch of disjointed utility access drives.  The newer buildings face the street.  They have front doors.  They have lobbies.  They aren't afraid of symmetry. 

 

UC's campus devolved long ago into a nebulous home for parallelograms, rhombuses, trapezoids, and a giant 4-cyclinder engine.  The damn engineering school looking like an engine is no different than that big basket building up in Norwalk looking like a basket because they build baskets. 

 

Except it was designed by a hot-shot architect so get ready to get shot down by people with degrees. 

 

Despite my degree, you won't hear me (or many) defending Graves or his post-modern engine. I will defend Crosley tower till the day it gets chipped away, and I will defend modern infill in OTR and Pendleton until the day I die. In both cases buildings should be built 'of their time' not trying to look like something they are not. The engineering building is not an engine, new apartments in Pendleton are not built in 1890. 

 

I had a professor who used the analogy of missing teeth (insert a "you went to Kentucky" joke here). If you are only missing one tooth and all the rest are straight and perfect and natural, do you infill with a veneer that tries to fit in perfectly but will always look a little "off" and won't be exactly the right color or sheen and will stick out for the wrong reasons; or do you just accept that your new tooth will always stick out and just get a gold tooth? You get the gold tooth and you let it shine! However, if you have many missing teeth, you can't do them all in gold or you'll look tacky, and with less of the original teeth to compare to all the veneers will match each other and will therefore look just fine.

 

There are parts of OTR where gold teeth are needed. Use your black brick, or your metal sheathing, or all shiny glass. Other areas have large swaths of missing frontage and a more appropriate and scaled approach is needed to re-create the 'row of teeth' that used to be there. If the entire parking lot in Pendleton is infilled with a 'gold tooth' the area will begin to lose the feel of a historic district. However if every infill tries to blend in and look the same, as Jake stated above, it feels like Disney.

Edited January 7, 20196 yr by ucgrady

 

55 minutes ago, jmecklenborg said:

so get ready to get shot down by people with degrees. 

?

 

I really do believe that the difference between neo and faux comes down to material used and method of construction. Neo includes anything using either or both material or method of the original. Faux does neither, but looks like the original. Contextual contemporary chooses one or the other and might not look like the original, but does reference the original. <-Haven't written a white paper on this... just straight up conjecture.

 

You might consider the new business school a neo-brutalist building, or just a straight up brutalist building (because its height wasnt that long ago). A style that many folks just don't have an appetite for, but in the end, they've used high quality materials, a really exciting, diagrammatic program organization (that references the Hargreaves master plan, that references the original street grid), and been delicate with the budget enough to include green roofs and courtyards. I think the majority of the public is going to be very pleased with what they encounter when visiting this building and not just judging it based off of what they prefer stylistically. 

 

Personally, I am a fan of Marian Spencer Hall because of its brickwork, which was laid using an innovative brick laying technology that allowed for a more textured surface, and the way it contrasts the two glass towers... and I'm not just saying that because I work at the firm that designed the building. Take a close look at the brick. I'd love to use the same brick laying tech on an infill project in OTR/Pendleton. 

 

41 minutes ago, ucgrady said:

you won't hear me (or many) defending Graves or his post-modern engine.

 

I'll defend it. Post-modernism is not faux historicism as many professors in the late 90's and 00's might explain to their students with snarled noses. It's a playful breaking of formal rules imposed by modernism's rigid cannon and the further I get away from academic circles (as much as I can considering I teach in the arch/int des program now) the more I appreciate it for what it is doing. Now... the interior of the building leaves much to be desired, except for maybe the main lobby. Graves oscillated between formality and informality and in the end, let formality control too much on the exterior, creating odd window conditions and room configurations on the interior... but maybe that's part of the post-modern joke as well.

 

And in the spirit of joking about whether or not people with architecture degrees are allowed to speak with confidence on the subject of architecture I am mockingly posting this meme because I assume its how some think all of the architects on this forum are feverishly pounding on their keyboards. The reality is much different. In summary, I like the conversation we are having about architecture. It is rare that anything is 100% trash or 100% incredible. I like discussing and debating the ambiguity in between. 

 

Edited January 7, 20196 yr by Chas Wiederhold

8 hours ago, BigDipper 80 said:

A question for the architects on this board: At what point does a building's design move from being "faux historic" to being "XYZ Revival" architecture? Is the Collegiate Gothic of Yale's campus less valid and honest as an architectural form because it copies 800 year old ecclesiastical architecture for dorms and classrooms? What about the Tudor revival downtown buildings in Mariemont? Not trying to be snarky, I'm just trying to better understand where the line lies between "acceptable" and "unacceptable" when translating older forms of architecutre. Is it about context, since both college campuses and places like Mariemont are somewhat self-contained, unlike an OTR-type setting? 

 

I think a building becomes "faux historic" when it tries to take pieces of a past architectural style and cheaply recreate them, or tries to replicate surrounding historic buildings with cheap materials and a half-assed attempt at quality. I think there's a way to build new buildings to look historic without being tacky. Look no further than Wood Companies in Columbus. The infill they build is impeccable! The quality, attention to detail, and materials are all top notch. The average person passing one of their buildings would assume its always been there. But they take their time building their buildings, and their rent prices are astronomical. Quality vs. quantity. 

 

5 hours ago, ucgrady said:

Despite my degree, you won't hear me (or many) defending Graves or his post-modern engine. I will defend Crosley tower till the day it gets chipped away, and I will defend modern infill in OTR and Pendleton until the day I die. In both cases buildings should be built 'of their time' not trying to look like something they are not. The engineering building is not an engine, new apartments in Pendleton are not built in 1890. 

 

I had a professor who used the analogy of missing teeth (insert a "you went to Kentucky" joke here). If you are only missing one tooth and all the rest are straight and perfect and natural, do you infill with a veneer that tries to fit in perfectly but will always look a little "off" and won't be exactly the right color or sheen and will stick out for the wrong reasons; or do you just accept that your new tooth will always stick out and just get a gold tooth? You get the gold tooth and you let it shine! However, if you have many missing teeth, you can't do them all in gold or you'll look tacky, and with less of the original teeth to compare to all the veneers will match each other and will therefore look just fine.

 

There are parts of OTR where gold teeth are needed. Use your black brick, or your metal sheathing, or all shiny glass. Other areas have large swaths of missing frontage and a more appropriate and scaled approach is needed to re-create the 'row of teeth' that used to be there. If the entire parking lot in Pendleton is infilled with a 'gold tooth' the area will begin to lose the feel of a historic district. However if every infill tries to blend in and look the same, as Jake stated above, it feels like Disney.

 

Can you explain to me why you love Crosley Tower? I really want to like it, but I find it a prime example of form not following function. And I have a personal vendetta against brutalism (I often refer to Crosley as Azkaban Prison). 

Edited January 8, 20196 yr by Lucas_uLsac
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Mostly because it is celebrating its own construction in a pure way. Most buildings built in modern construction are layers upon layers of structure, insulation, plastic membrane, exterior sheathing or something similar. Even when you see a building with “structural expression” like John Hancock in Chicago you aren’t really seeing the steel members but aluminum cladding that covers the real structure. 

 

Does the building function well as modern labs? No, but Crosley tower is about one thing, concrete. It is a single pour, no joints, all the way up. No paint, no vapor barrier, no cladding of any kind, just a bare naked concrete pour in all its ugly pure simplicity.  

7 minutes ago, ucgrady said:

just a bare naked concrete pour in all its ugly pure simplicity

 

Right, so does that make it a worthwhile endeavor?  Anything can be pure and simple, but that doesn't automatically make it good.  At least admitting that it's ugly is a step in the right direction.  To the layperson, it's just ugly, and all the pontification simply reinforces the notion that architects have their heads up their asses.  All the tactile purity doesn't change the fact that it's ugly, poorly functional, and a thermal disaster.  

 

The line between faux-historic and revival or authentic vernacular is very much a matter of opinion and unlikely to ever be objective.  I do want to reiterate, as I have in the past, that the buildings of OTR are revival styles in and of themselves.  They're mostly ItalianATE, or Federal STYLE.  Yes they are built more like their actual historical counterparts than today's building are built like them, but in Renaissance Italy they weren't making cornices of pressed tin, roofs of tar and rosin paper, or windows with 10 feet of glass.  

 

I would argue that so long as the execution is good, both in the design and the materials, that lifts a building out of faux territory.  Make the cornice brackets out of polyurethane, they can look just as good as wood ones, but you won't find off-the-shelf ones with the right design or proportions.  Tall windows cost more than short, as do tall ceilings, but that's marginal in the grand scheme of things.  Vinyl Gilkey windows aren't going to fly, but fiberglass absolutely can, they don't have to be all-wood single-pane.  If the brick is veneer, again that's fine.  What I want to see is some tighter mortar joints, they've gotten way too big, but it saves a couple rows of bricks, ugh. 

 

This is where I think the real problem is.  Every...last...little...minor...thing...imaginable is squeezed to the bleeding edge of cheap.  We should be using Hardie siding instead of wood, but we get viny crap instead.  I mentioned windows before.  Joists get spaced a little farther apart so they can use two or three less.  Brackets get shrunk down or not used at all.  Overhangs are scrapped because they require more trim.  It's not that doing a decent building will cost 2x or 3x as much as a cheap one, it's the push to wring out that last 5-10% where a project goes from decent to an embarrassment.  

 

Two examples I've worked on come to mind.  One got a whole new cornice rebuilt from scratch, about 20 feet long.  That cost on the order of $7,500 to build, which sounds like a lot, but that was only 1% of the entire construction budget.  Money well spent if you ask me.  If we had to go through an extensive value-engineering process however, it would have been significantly cut back to compensate for so many other fixed costs, and who knows what the result would be.  There's never a magic-bullet item that can "fix" the budget, so everything has to get put through the wringer.   Another project, the Kingsgate Marriott actually, was something I worked on in my first ever architecture job.  They were in the process of value-engineering, and I was just a first year college student.  One particular item I "presided" over was the elevator penthouses.  They're just brick "rooms" on top of the roof that house the elevator motor and other stuff.  As originally designed, they had a 4-inch recess on each side to give them some articulation like the rest of the building.  That recess was reduced to 1" or maybe even 1/2" in order to eliminate the steel lintels holding the brick above.  That's a few hundred dollars worth of steel for a multi-million dollar project, but hey, everything's fair game right?  Even at the time I knew it was BS, but they did it.  Today they'd probably eliminate the brick altogether and do corrugated metal or something.  My point is that this is the level of scrutiny we're dealing with.  It's not trimming the design fat, it's cutting to the bone.  

Both Crosley Tower and Kingsgate Marriot float out in nebulous space, like pretty much all of UC's postwar construction.  What I find particularly egregious is the way Turner Hall at least parallels Jefferson Ave., but there is not a door facing Jefferson.  Instead, there is a nebulous "south entrance", a nebulous "north entrance", and a nebulous "east entrance".  There is no west entrance, which would be a door opening onto Jefferson.  Calhoun at least had a door that faced...Calhoun.

 

I get that they're worried about "crime", but most crime on a college campus is committed by the students themselves, their invited guests, and/or their invited weed/cocaine dealer.  I just heard some 20~ year-olds the other week talking about some guy who was running a drug empire out of Daniels Hall.  Good thing it doesn't open right onto Jefferson! 

10 hours ago, jmecklenborg said:

 Calhoun at least had a door that faced...Calhoun.

 

I love that entry, but when I lived in Calhoun we were prohibited from using it, and I believe it remains that way today. I imagine it disappears in the re-cladding of the building which was supposedly planned, but I haven't heard anything about it for a while. I wish they would keep it how it is, just update the windows and repair the brickwork. I love how Calhoun, Siddall, Dyer, and the YMCA all work with each other materially. I might even be so bold to say that Calhoun and Siddall are examples of good infill even though they are a shift in scale from their surroundings: 

 

I'm curious what everyone thinks of Empower's building in OTR. Good? Bad? What moves do the architects make that deem it successful / unsuccessful as historic infill? 

 

Calhoun and Siddall are basically "historic" at this point, as are their surrounding plazas.  Actually only Calhoun has the back plaza, but it doesn't get a ton of use because UC never made an attempt to make it nice.  The rear entrance to Calhoun with the "tree" style pillar in the middle is pretty cool.  I can't remember if Siddall has an answer to that. 

 

I think we'll see something similar to UPA built into the grassy hillside along Calhoun between the YMCA and the law school.  That'll make it one of the densest street walls outside a downtown in the Midwest. 

 

 

Quote

 

I'm curious what everyone thinks of Empower's building in OTR. Good? Bad? What moves do the architects make that deem it successful / unsuccessful as historic infill? 

 

1. Respects the scale of the street, especially important on a narrow street.

2. Has large glass openings on the ground floor similar in scale to traditional storefront windows.

3. Honors the massing of surrounding buildings with a articulated base that is different from the 2-3 stories above.

4. Has "punched" windows that are vertical and spaced proportional to surrounding buildings.

5. Uses modern materials in a compatible and non-"show off" way.

Edited January 9, 20196 yr by mcmicken

I've become kind of obsessed with the "faux historic" buildings that populate the French Quarter, and I'm curious what everyone's opinion is on them. Most of them were built during the "Disneyfication" of the Quarter in the 1960s and replaced other buildings that were still historic, but didn't fit the overall aesthetic narrative that preservationists at the time were pushing for. Most of them look decent from street level as you're strolling past them, but if you spend enough time studying them you can tell they're a facsimile of lesser quality than the original buildings of the neighborhood. They're almost all hotels or parking garages, so their massing tends to be out of scale with the rest of the neighborhood. 

The hotel on the right is an infill block. 

 

Again, the building on the right is probably only 50 years old. 

 

These are both parking garages. 

 

I think this was one of the first infill projects in the Quarter, and you can see how it employs some of the same "broken facade" tricks that developers still use on their yuppie boxes. 

Edited May 24, 20196 yr by BigDipper 80

The whole French Quarter phenomenon is a bit of a fake.  The area was never the city's red light district or any kind of special attention until the 1960s.  The House of the Rising Sun stuff actually occurred in an area that was completely demolished on the opposite side of Rampart.  

 

The actual notorious part of New Orleans in the 1800s and early 1900s was here:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/New+Orleans,+LA/@29.9608825,-90.0747476,1015m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x8620a454b2118265:0xdb065be85e22d3b4!8m2!3d29.9510658!4d-90.0715323

 

You can see the outline of a former railroad station and its approach tracks slashing diagonally across the site, and then of course the public housing and RV park (!) that took this historic area's place.  

 

 

I noticed an apartment development in Gaithersburg, MD, that I thought had a very "Cleveland" look.  Gaithersburg is what used to be a distant suburb of Wash DC but is considered fairly close-in these days; the market housing market in G'burg ranges from low high-end to "affordable".  Anyway here's a picture of what caught my eye. The buildings are in fact connected; the developer put a slightly different look on all the street-front projections.  1BR rents start at $1,986 (920 sq ft); 2 BR start at $2,117 (1152 sq ft).

 

Wouldn't some of these look better than a lot of the ho-hummers being built in Cleveland lately?

 

 

 

This thread brought to mind these row houses built in Chicago.

 

 

One of the better attempts to recreate the older style buildings

yo dawg we herd u like bldgs so we built buildings in your courtyard — 😂

 

 

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2DX11BOXSH/?igsh=MTFva3R0bjFnNnh3Nw==