The floor going up now is the roof, it will probably be done by the end of the week

Yesterday:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...56e5d91c_b.jpg

(Spark construction site on the right.)

https://i.imgur.com/yccl64F.jpg

Taken 4/18

Same vantage point as above pic, basically, but 6 more weeks of cladding is up. Wandering around on the other side of the river and you can see this poking up from behind Cira Green pretty well

This one looks so bad. It's good density and activation of the area, but it's valued engineered to an inch of its life lol.

Yeah but it's student housing so I can live with it. I wish it looked better but it could be worse.

This may be the ugliest building being constructed in the 2020s.

I don’t mind it. The color palette isn’t bad and it isn’t meant to be some kind of trophy building. It isn’t prefab or modular, so I’ll take it.

Agreed and I think it looks better in person than it does in pictures.

It looks far better than I thought it would. In fact, I think it looks better than a lot of what else is going up.

On another note, is the squat building on the left side of the of the render the new Spark facility? And if so, is it an accurate rendering?

The squat building is the current post office. Spark is being built across the street in the below-grade surface lot.

Yeah, the new Spark manufacturing building - although being a flat/rectangle - will have some style to it.

Bunch of renderings here:
https://www.ocfrealty.com/naked-phil...street-station

Just looking at the comments in the OCF article and people complaining about height. This is a 21st century factory and it's use doesn't necessitate a tall building. This plot has been out of any true functional use for 40 years. In my view, this is the perfect use for that piece of land.

6 stories next to THE transportation hub?
Unbelievable
I could spit

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...7d1ea35d_b.jpg3000 Chestnut Street 4-25-23 by

The building next to it is the Post Office. The Spark building is being build on the parking lot on the other side of Chestnut St.

never the less
this really pisses me off
1:20 hr to Midtown!
It's ridiculous

I can't agree on that one. So far, it's a combination of a few things for me on this one:

1. It's student housing which is 100% fine, but unfortunate it's between our most modern looking buildings (FMC/EVO/CIRA) because it sticks out like a sore thumb
2. The massing makes it very visible coming up 76W. It's literally like a black and white wall on approach.
3. From a purely urbanist nerd perspective, Philly already has too many long rectangular buildings. It would have been sick to get something more slender and stylish like the EVO

but in the end, it really doesn't matter. It adds solid density and with the rooftop details when all is said and done, it will be fine infill

To the architect's defense, they realized that which is why it's designed to look like 2-3 separate buildings to break it up visually.

I'm also not a fan of the long, rectangular buildings but in this case, it's literally sitting in a triple-wide rowhome lot. It's pretty incredible they decided to jam this large building into a block of 3 story buildings.

you would think there were no other empty lots in town with a comment like this.

True. I definitely stood on the back of Cira Green a number of times and never imagined another high rise would rise up out of the block.

This building definitely turned out better than the renderings had led us to believe, but that isn't saying much. It's still a 5/10 at best.