Quote:
Originally Posted by BVictor1
Feel free to put that middies neighborhood elsewhere. This is downtown and screw that...
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When you say this is "downtown", you're setting up a false dichotomy. If it's downtown, then it's gotta be be sky-high, but if it's in the neighborhoods, we've gotta preserve the history! I'm not sure what "elsewhere" you have in mind, but you'd be saying the same thing about The 78 or Cabrini if neighborhood groups were advocating for shorter buildings.
Eventually those two zones, downtown and the neighborhoods, will need to run into each other. There's gotta be a transition, right? Streeterville and South Loop went tall, but they fit into a broader trend of lakefront highrises, most of which were built before I was born. The rationale for lakefront highrises, downtown or not, is obvious. West Loop is nowhere near the lake, and has no history of highrise development.
I don't know why everyone is so allergic to a midrise kind of urbanism that scales down from downtown to the neighborhoods and is at least somewhat respectful of streetscapes. TBH, I'm really tired of the whole tower-on-a-podium paradigm. Obviously there are obvious eyesores like Grand Plaza, but even the podiums that everyone seems to like, still kind of suck. The large parking garages kill the streetscape even if they don't always bring swarms of traffic, and the amenity decks on top of the podiums reek of privilege. The streetscape of the highrise neighborhood provides a poor sense of enclosure to the street, because there is no consistency to the cornice line and a bunch of gaps and side setbacks.