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Originally Posted by someone123
Founders Square included the restoration of the buildings along Prince Street too. Some of them still have functional entrances and street-facing shops and they look great.
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Actually there were a number of street entrances retained on Hollis St also. But there was no market there for that kind of small retail space since Hollis isn't much of a retail street these days. Eventually they got locked as the ground floor was converted to offices. I believe the only street-facing entrances on Prince are used by The Old Triangle pub, which seems to be the only thing there that has ever been a success.
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A bunch of people in Halifax bring up "human scale" and think it means that buildings need to be close in size to people, but that is just silly. Buildings can be much larger but they need to have features that make sense on a human scale if they are to be appealing on more than an abstract level. You can find giant skyscrapers in New York (mostly old ones) that are like this; they are 80 storeys tall but still look approachable from the street. A lot of modern architects would have no idea how to replicate that.
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While I think a lot of the preservation/resto talk is largely BS, you raise an interesting point, which I would sum up as the failure of the architecture and planning professions. We are churning out people in these fields with more extensive and expensive training than ever before, yet there seems to be universal dislike of the things architects produce, while planning has become a circular process of trying things that were tried 50 or 100 years ago and abandoned. Where have they gone wrong?