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Old Posted May 15, 2010, 11:48 PM
k1052 k1052 is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2007
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hayward View Post
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.
Wrigleyville already has an "energetic atmosphere" and little shy of demolishing Wrigley Field can substantially damage it. The ground floor retail in most of the West/South loop buildings is an afterthought since it's unsellable for residential purposes, not a cohesive development with tenants waiting in the wings as the case is here.
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