Quote:
Originally Posted by r18tdi
^ That backside, woof
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How many times do people make this comment and others explain it. Welcome to living in a city dude, you can't build a building lot line to lot line on a tiny lot and NOT have a big 🞵🞵🞵 blank wall in one direction. It's called a party wall and it's on virtually every prewar building whether you can see it or whether it's hidden by being faced by another party wall of another building. This is not a design failure, this is not ugly, this is a fact of life. This building would be impossible to build (and stupid to building since you'd be cladding the elevator core in glass) with windows on all sides. You'd have to shave like 4-5' of width off the already skinny building to provide enough setback from the lot line to meet firecode.
TLDR: please stop being shocked every time you see a building with a blank wall on a lot line, these are not design decisions, they are a basic fact of life in cities.
Quote:
Originally Posted by patriotizzy
Goodness me that building looks atrocious. Prime and hot for the 60s maybe, but we are decades beyond this.
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OK whatever dude, I didn't see anyone here giving this building accolades for being the most revolutionary building of 2018. I also don't see what's wrong with it at all, the facade quality is decent, the urban planning is decent, it's even being squeezed into a tiny site on top of existing foundations of a parking garage. Does every building have to look like two cockroaches making love?
Quote:
Originally Posted by 10023
^ I think we see a lot worse. At least there are no balconies and no (or at least very little) above ground parking.
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There is actually a row of balconies on the North and South facades of this building. They are extremely benign though and well integrated with the design.
Quote:
Originally Posted by 10023
I don’t think people who are used to Chicago/River North realize what a profound difference it makes to have someone’s apartment or office on the next floor above ground level. That’s far more important than building height to me. It creates a fundamentally different urban environment.
Chicago needs to ban above ground parking before it destroys more neighborhoods (or prevents those now being developed, like the South Loop, from ever becoming pleasant urban environments).
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OK, I'm just going to throw this out there: above grade garages really aren't that big of a deal. I'm sorry, but even in River North, I hardly notice them. And that's coming from someone who studies this stuff day in and day out. There simply aren't enough of them to even register and the ones that do register register simply as another parking garage which, much like party walls, is an extremely common phenomenon in modern cities. So while it's certainly not optimal and they should have liner units, no they aren't "ruining neighborhoods", that's totally absurd.
The thing that kills the streetscape is blank first floors like all those precious midrises in the West Loop. No one is ever like "this building has a nice tower and a first floor full of retail, but I'm not going to walk by it because it has parking on floors 2-6". That just doesn't happen, and if you think it does, you are spending way too much time in the SSP echochamber.
So yes, above grade parking is ugly and sub-optimal, but in reality (and I'm taking about the 95% of the population that actually uses cities, not Arab billionaires or whoever the hell 10023 thinks is the most important demographic) no one actually notices it. In fact, in Chicago there are places where podiums are the only logical use of that space. For example, literally any building fronting an elevated line in the Loop should have it's parking in a podium (though it should really have little to no parking) because you can't even see the garage because of the elevated structure and no one wants to live or work 10' away from screeching L wheels 20 hours a day.
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