Quote:
Originally Posted by Dtbuilder
LOL no there is no code about this. Everyone that is begging for codes requiring "form based design" may not realize that it would kill development in Austin so hopefully not the same people celebrating the number of skyscrapers we have under construction right now which puts every similar sized city in America to shame. It also seems that a lot of folks commenting on this forum don't even live in or frequent downtown Austin so I'm not sure where the fuss is? You can barely see these rails from the street. The fussing about the garage cladding, however, may be justified.
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Would requiring even a slight increase in the scrutiny the city puts on design truly
kill development? Or would it just slow down a bit from the pace it's been at for the last 8-10 years or so?
Because (by way of example) I'd rather have 2-3 good looking buildings under construction at any given time instead of 6-7 aggressively mediocre ones. In my (obviously subjective) opinion, a skyscraper with a C+ design is not meaningfully better than "nothing at all."
Look at a few Canadian cities: Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal have all had very nice skylines. Among those, Vancouver is the one with huge growth and large numbers of new buildings constructed without any thought towards their design over the last two decades. Across any city in Canada, it is likely the closes comparison to Austin in terms of growth, and huge increases in residential populations in a downtown area. Today, Vancouver's skyline is a shell of its former self and the only thing keeping it relatively nice is the water and backdrop of mountains and actual nature. Their residential buildings -- which now dominate the skyline -- look very much the same style as Paseo, River St. residences, the Travis, etc.: (1) white/beige paired with blue glass floor-to-ceiling windows, (2) tons of balconies sticking out, along with (3) design features (if any) amounting to a couple of setbacks or staggered windows across floors.
As someone who was both born in Austin, lived here for the last 30+ years, and lived and worked downtown for the last 10 years, I'm certainly not saying that the city needs to be overly restrictive and demand perfection when it comes to new developments. But there is still a line that can be drawn between that and the current rules of "let developers design however they want, provided they have large enough sidewalks with a few trees." For example, the Waterline doesn't look all that bad, but in comparing it to every other 950"+ building in the U.S., it is certainly high in the running for worst looking. Likewise, 6xGuad is (again in my very subjective opinion) the outright ugliest 800'+ building in Country. While Paseo is great in terms of street-level commercial, etc., the portion of the building visible in the skyline has -- along with River St. residences, Travis, ATX tower, and a few others -- absolutely nothing going for it.
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