Quote:
Originally Posted by coolmillion
A similar context in Vancouver to Barrington would be Gastown historic district where the Woodward's district was recently completed. This includes a tall highrise next to low-rise heritage buildings and it is the result of a very long planning and consultation process. It includes public spaces, low income housing, the renovation of historic buildings, public art, etc. etc.
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But how do things like low income housing or public art really mitigate the effect of having a tall building near shorter buildings? I don't think the Woodward condos are amazingly planned, I think that building a highrise next to shorter heritage buildings is just not as big a deal as it's made out to be.
Many skylines have a limited number of buildings without much in the way of surrounding highrises. Frankfurt is one example that looks great. Really the whole debate is about the aesthetics of a poor abstraction -- skyline shape, which cannot even be separated from the design of the highrises themselves. Kind of sad, but such is the state of planning.
I also think that people are exaggerating how dramatic these buildings are, which is particularly easy to do in the absence of renderings. The buildings might end up 50% taller than Fenwick. They are probably not going to be twice the height of downtown office buildings because they are residntial, so the floor heights will be smaller. People who talk about everything in terms of floor count are not accurately comparing building size.
Yet another thing that is annoying about this is how dogmatic this debate has become. There is an implicit "pecking order" of cities and people get upset if they are confronted the cognitive dissonance caused by the flaws in their poor conception of reality. It
doesn't matter how tall the buildings in Vancouver are. The real factors are how much the development costs, how much financing the developer can get, maybe how much demand there is for space, and whether or not the city's infrastructure can handle the building.
The other factors are artificial and whatever coherent arguments they might be associated with are not being communicated very well.