Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Downtown
Yes, nearly always.
It’s the streetscapes that make a city pleasant and desirable, not the novelty or height of skyscrapers. Most people prefer the streetscape of Greenwich Village to that of Sixth Avenue in Midtown. The sterile plazas and towers of Bunker Hill or Figueroa Street pale beside the pleasures of LA’s Grand Central Market or Spring Street. We enjoy a walk through Oxford Circus more than one through the Isle of Dogs, the Left Bank more than La Défense, Hackescher Markt more than Potsdamer Platz, Nanjing-Lu more than Pudong.
Even leaving aside microclimate effects, small-scale residential buildings are more engaged with the street. They typically provide more architectural interest and landscaping. The residents offer more social control (eyes on the street) over the sidewalk only a few feet below than do skydwellers way up above a parking podium. As proven in public housing all over the world, highrises don’t work well for children or the poor. In recent decades, ground-floor retail has been out of fashion with developers and condo boards, resulting in bleak sidewalks even in the wealthiest districts.
Can you cite a single postwar supertall that you enjoy walking past? That you think makes a contribution to the streetscape?
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Actually a mix of building types and heights in an urban neighborhood is what I prefer. I like the juxtaposition of older buildings with newer buildings of different heights and styles, and different streetlevel activities and uses as well. Also in most cities retail should be concentrated on certain streets and not just stuffed into every nook and cranny(not talking about the exceptions like Manhattan here either). Not every building has to be right up to the street-breaks in the streetscape with building set back on occasion with seating, plantings, water features, etc. are pleasant as well-not all plazas have to be sterile and devoid of life. And interesting how all of your examples are all extremes-nothing in between..funny that.
And yes many supertall buildings were not built with the streetscape in mind-but that does not mean that they have to continue to be built that way. And nobody is advocating housing all the children in the World in highrises, are they? What percentage of the city of Chicago is covered in highrises?-what percentage of the population lives in highrises and exactly who are the expected tenants of these supertall buildings? Nobody is talking about leveling entire cities to build Le Corb nightmares or rehousing the population of Chicago in supertalls. No body is speaking in those extremes, so why are you mentioning them?
I will admit that the supertalls I have visited that I have personal experience with were not very pleasant at street level-especially the old WTC-that Austin J. Toba plaza was awful-windswept and desolate, with trash being swept up in small whirlwinds everywhere. But that does not mean they
have to be built like that in massive sterile supercomplexes. We have learned from that-or at least we should have.
You make some good points that I agree with, I just do not think in extremes like that-I make my own decisions on what I like based on my own criteria. If those spaces that are devoid of highrises are what your prefer, fine. But yours is just an opinion just like mine.
And I would ideally like a mixed environment-I would not want to live in a museum city like Venice or much of Paris for that matter. And just how affordable are those tmuseum cities for children and the poor? Aren't they pretty much send to the outskirts?
I also do not like areas like Pudong or Dubai not only because they are harsh at street level, but because they are the skyscraper equivalent of botanical gardens, full of exotic species (many quite unattractive) that individually scream for attention but end up making a jarring and disturbing skyline statement.
*Since you mentioned NYC (Greenwich Village) explain to me the negatives of 9 Dekalb now under construction in Brooklyn. Tell me how what was there before surpasses and is better than what is going in now, and that any negatives of that building outweigh the positives.
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