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Old Posted Jun 28, 2009, 2:37 PM
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miaht82 miaht82 is offline
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Location: The Triangle
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Quote:
Originally Posted by oldmanshirt View Post
Nothing wrong with the skyline that filling in a few gaps couldn't fix.

I really think the only reason SA's skyline suffers is because its in the same state as Dallas and Houston. Among Southwestern cities its not noticeably lacking in height, and actually compares well with some larger cities/metro areas like Sacramento, Orlando, Phoenix, Portland. I'm talking pure height here, not urbanity or quality of downtown living or recreating.

I used to think SA needed to get some 500'-600' towers downtown like yesterday, but after seeing the quality and beauty that can go into a "short" development like the Vistana, I'm more of a mindset that a 17-25 story building can be just as good if it interacts well with the street and the surrounding buildings. Lets focus on getting people in downtown and eat up some surface parking however we can, and leave the you-know-what measuring to other cities

(here I go)
This is true, height adds to the look, not so much the feel of a "DT" area.
I've been in Tokyo now for a month and have made MANY observations of what is possibly the closest thing to perfect urbanity in the world.
Height has nothing to do with anything but office space. This is never more noticeable than in Tokyo City, CBD. I went there on a Sunday and it was dead. Nice skyline, (city and Nissan Skyline GTR's too) but it just lacked that something that the midrise apartments add to every other "city" that has a major train station. You can google image some of these; Yokohama, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Fujisawa, Akihabara, Roppongi, Ginza and they can all be interchangeable. These cities/stations, are only about 2-3 km apart and repeat about 20 or so times in the entire metro area. Almost like a shopping mall in the US. The only thing that is different is the things that within walking distance, whether it be landmarks, or certain office buildings or parks or "specific" districts (such as electric town, kitchen district, high-end shopping, cool tokyo). But when you look outside of these shopping areas (usually about 16 blocks or so of retail and more) there are the 3 or 4 blocks deep, when looking at radius, of high to midrise housing. Even the smaller stations have small shopping areas around them with mid-rise housing around that.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that skyscraping offices are not really necessary to have a nice urban area. The surely add to it, but new offices are almost the last step in revitalization, only after the old offices have been converted into quick housing and then new office space becomes necessary.
It would look nice, but I'd rather see more MF housing in empty lots or unused lots; build up that density.
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