Quote:
Originally Posted by seamusmcduff
Part of the Surrey City Centre Plan design guidelines is the shape of the Skyline. The City wants "peaks and valleys" in their skyline, with the highest points being at the Skytrain stations.
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For sure. Not to get too off topic but my general beef has been with the plan's "peaks" specifically and that they are both too short for a major downtown and not defined situationally for the argument they try to make.
On the first, their max FSR in the plan seems to call for 7.5ish which to me is tiny. You look at most major downtowns especially in the USA and FSRs > 20 are not unheard of but for some reason Metro Vancouver in general likes these skinny point towers with no real substance. Maybe some urban planner will pop up and tell me "walkability" and "scale" or some BS about how most downtowns are terrible, but I dunno, there's a lot of people that seem to successfully live in cities like Hong Kong, New York, and Melbourne all of which have many buildings that out FSR even the highest FSR in Vancouver itself and seem to not be exploding.
I think the boundary of Surrey Central should allow for towers at any point and any of the taper off for the skyline be left to the outskirts. You can build the 6 storey condos outside the boundary. That's actually what _is_ happening right now, and that is where your skyline tapers off.
The secondary beef I've had is that I've yet to see a definition of how the "skyline" looks from what aspect. When you look at view cones in Vancouver for example, they are very explicit in where you are "viewing" the skyline from (in general it is from the direction of Queen E Park toward the North Shore Mountains and major roads heading that direction N/S). But in Surrey maybe I'm missing something but it doesn't seem to have ever been established. The skyline today looks completely different depending on if you're viewing from Burnaby, New Westminster, or Coquitlam. You can't really view it from other areas of the region due to hills and trees (aka Delta or Langley).
If you view it from Coquitlam for example, it actually looks quite filled and dense, compared to if you view if from New Westminster where the skyline looks super sparse with massive gaps.
Same skyline. This is because from Coquitlam you're actually looking basically North > South which is the SkyTrain route. So from that perspective there would only really be one peak since all the SkyTrain stations line up that viewing direction. But again from new West, you would end up with 3 different peaks because it is a side profile (east > west) and the SkyTrain stations are north > south.
So I just find it a dumb perspective to build an entire plan around and force the edges into building only 6 storey condos for some perceived peak/valley look that nobody has seemed to define. Nobody gives too craps about "peaks and valleys" when they're actually in downtown. Can you tell that Living Shangri-la is taller than Wall Tower when you're actually downtown? Not really. I mean I'm all for form and beauty, but I don't feel Surrey is anywhere near such a critical mass that this needs to be so set in stone.
I could be insane though who knows.
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