Posts tagged Urban Design
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HPRB landmarks Third Church
I attended the Historic Preservation Review Board meeting last Thursday, which was a special meeting to discuss the landmarking of the Christian Science Church on 16th and I. After hearing from architectural historians and church representatives, the board members affirmed their belief that the church met the criteria for landmarking, while also qualifying their votes… Keep reading…
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Landmark or mistake?
If a building is ugly, doesn’t serve its intended purpose, and the people who own it want to tear it down… but it was built by the firm of a famous architect and is a prime example of its architectural style, should it be a landmark? That’s the debate before the DC Historic Preservation Review Board about the Third Church of Christ, Scientist (aka Christian Science)… Keep reading…
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The soul-crushing emptiness of downtown DC
410,000 people enter Washington, DC each weekday (as of 2005), the second-largest increase of any American city. But if you walk around large parts of downtown in the middle of the day, you might not think so. So many buildings face inward, with their public spaces in central courtyards cut off from the fabric of the city, feeding their workers in indoor cafeterias, leaving the… Keep reading…
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Brooklyn puts retail in municipal building
“From the street, [Brooklyn’s Municipal Building] looks like ‘dead space,’” writes the Brooklyn Paper. “‘People have just accepted that government buildings are only for government,’” says Joe Chan of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership. Downtown DC is even worse, with back to back Federal buildings each of which… Keep reading…
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Charleston
Last month, I visited Charleston for the Democratic debate. Here are my thoughts on the debate itself. The next day, I got to walk around historic Charleston. It has some beautiful old Southern houses, and some great commercial streets with historic brightly colored townhouses. For a small city, it has some pedestrian activity in the evenings, though the jobs aren’t downtown… Keep reading…
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Washington’s good streets and bad streets
Washington, DC is a city with some of the most magnificent public spaces and some of the worst at the same time. The Mall is mixed; it’s a huge tourist attraction with great, free museums and monuments, but many of the buildings present blank stone walls to the streets and there are too many cars, rendering it more of an empty grassy space between attractions than a destination in… Keep reading…
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Building real community in Allston
Drawing a pretty architectural diagram with lots of pictures of people is easy. Creating a real vibrant community where people want to go is harder. Harvard has noble intentions and many very good ideas for the new science campus (PDF) it is planning in Allston. I’ve praised it in the past. Keep reading…
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“Improvement”
Before: Keep reading…
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T is for Transit-Oriented or Towers in the Park?
From Le Corbusier to today, architects of the automobile era designed buildings that look good from an automobile vantage point: serene and beautiful at high distance or while passing at high speed, but become imposing and dehumanizingly out-of-scale at human distance. Large windswept grassy areas or concrete plazas provide pleasing visual separation at car scale but… Keep reading…
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New York public spaces good and bad
Speaking of public space, the Project for Public Spaces has put together a detailed commentary on New York’s public space - the good spaces, the terrible ones, and the opportunities for the future. Keep reading…