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Originally Posted by Drybrain
"Geography of Nowhere" author James Howard Kunstler caught wind of this building— he's not impressed. (Granted, he's using the pre-revision rendering.) |
Anyways, he's got his facts wrong. The cantilever isn't over "Province House". It's a bank.
Doesn't Mr. Sprawl understand that we *have* sprawl because of the difficulty and failure to allow more intense downtown development, including high rise?
Reading the comments, which is a bunch of people mostly complaining (expectedly) about the development, one commentator wistfully remembers a visit to Halifax "40 years ago", and illustrates some funny cognitive dissonance:
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Now comes the above eyesore with a whopping “set-over.” Who got the payoff on the air-rights for this thing? The city? Forty years ago the downtown was inviting. What we have here is a looming sword of architectural Damocles. This goes beyond what I call “The Tipsy School” of architecture, to something deeply foreboding. Are the city fathers (and mothers too) aware that what they should have done with this historic building is keep the high-rises away from it with low and mid-rise zoning to preserve its urban context.
Context? What’s that?
Footnote: I looked at a satellite photo of Halifax. The waterfront, which has some nice attractions and historic properties, alas seems to have an alarming amount of space taken up by parking lots.
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Naturally, he's inclined to dislike the proposal. And, funnily, wonders why we haven't kept "the high rises away" from the "low and mid rise zoning" to "preserve its urban context".
Well, now. Seems to me outside of a few odd exceptions (Maritime Centre) our entire history of development is keeping high rises away from pretty much everything and everywhere.
Moreover, while lamenting a new development, he then laments the "alarming" amount of parking lots on the waterfront!
Those parking lots are a happy (or sad? depending on your POV) reminder of the successes (or failures) of height limits, view planes, and rampart laws, that have "preserved" the "urban context", which includes those "alarming" parking lots, empty holes, etc, on the waterfront and elsewhere.
Our problem is that in 40 years *everything* has moved from the core slowly, but surely, to suburbia. That's not the fault of a cantilever design in 2014; it's the fault of legal and civil society obstructionism (height limits), economic conditions, and badly managed urban planning.
With some of the other commentators (this one is "DarrenHFX") I wonder if we've been living in the same city:
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I’m from Halifax myself and there has been a slow creep of office towers and related facilities into the historic downtown core over the last 40 years. Most of it has been poorly designed and has absolutely no relationship to the street and sidewalk offering many a block barren of anything meaningful. Bad decisions have extended consequences unfortunately. There are a few gems that do remain and I do hope that they don’t get encased in a similar fashion as this architect’s conceptual image.
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There's been a "slow creep of office towers" into the "historic downtown core"? Really now? Where, exactly, were these "office towers" before? Where were they creeping from? Halifax Harbour? The South End? In fact the entire "historic" downtown is made up of historic office buildings and towers. What delusional world are you living in? Perhaps Darren is from Halifax, Yorkshire, England? That makes more sense.
Seems to me, that the actual "slow creep" has been office space out into business and retail parks-- Burnside, Bayers, Dartmouth Crossing, etc.