Quote:
Originally Posted by Austinlee
My sarcastic (and not intended to be malicious) point being, the architectural details are what make buildings what they are so I don't understand this exercise.
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I'm trying to distinguish between ornamental details and substantive details. Ornamental details do in fact matter if you are concerned about how a building looks. But if you are also concerned about issues like land use policy, than the substantive details also matter.
So part of my point is that while people may be reacting positively to a lot of the ornamental details--I am too, in fact, I think it looks neat--it is also important to understand that there is very little actual substance to this plan.
I also think it is worth noting that at least in some particulars, Point Park is trying to mislead people even about how the building would look. The clearest example of that is the vertical stretch they applied to the courtyard rendering. Although this is crude, I played around with different corrections until I got something that made the facades look about right in vertical to horizontal ratio (the facades being in the design were very useful in this respect). The correction ratio I ended up with was 75%, which means they applied something like a 33% vertical stretch originally.
At a minimum, even if you only care about how the building would look and don't care at all what is there in substance, you should at least be concerned that they were trying to deceive you about how it would actually look. And I personally think this is an important credibility issue in general. Personally, I don't trust them to necessarily provide all these nice ornamental details, or to actually use the facades in this way, and so on, when the final building is built. In other words, I think there are good reasons to be concerned that if this gets approved because it looks nice in renderings, we will end up the victims of a bait-and-switch.
So those are some points for your consideration. Obviously you are free to have different priorities (I take land use policy and historic preservation very seriously, for example, and others may not). You are indeed free to dispute some of my conclusions (although I think the vertical stretch thing is pretty hard to deny). But I thought, and still think, it was at least worth taking a little time to illustrate what I am suggesting, rather than just saying it with words.