Quote:
Originally Posted by Hayward
If you are well educated in urban design and understand the psychological impacts buildings can have on generating busy energetic atmospheres, you will understand how a fine-grained arrangement of buildings lends itself to better neighborhood atmospheres.
Developers and architects tend to get very dreamy eyed when they built up all those West and south loop block-long buildings with ground floor retail. It seemingly had the mix of right ingredients to build successful streetscapes, but they were wrong. The areas out front of the buildings have a quiet feel to them, they are not energized in the way Wrigleyville is.....reason being the more subdivisions of architecture you have along the street, the more interesting and diverse a street becomes.
Unless we are downtown, I'm very against large single-building multi-use developments. In my opinion this development should at most occupy the under-utilized space on Addison, not Clark. This project has still not been scaled back enough to be a well fit component for this neighborhood.
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I tend to agree with you, but I would point out that there are quite a few successful large multi-use historic buildings, particularly theatre buildings - think of for example the Lakeshore or Music Box.