Quote:
Originally Posted by combusean
It's not that far from an average garden apartment but they just seemed to trade surface parking for more landscaping and anyone who pays attention knows how much trees die in heat and landlords stop taking care of the original plants. Modernism and its history of overbuilt plazas, greenspaces, and even "tower in the park" concepts have a really bad history with delivering on those shared spaces because if everyone owns them, nobody does.
Car free and all is great, but I'd rather have the hundred or so other complexes that are actually dense and oftentimes have a more coherent mix of uses, especially for the land they occupy.
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Yes, I visited for the first time a few weeks ago, and I was surprised at how low-rise and open it felt. There are many buildings along Apache that have a more dense and urban appearance even with their oversized parking structures. It also seemed weird that despite all the car-free hype, the on-site restaurant, Cocina Chiwas, has it entrance facing away from the street and towards the guest parking. Yes, I know most Chiwas customers will probably drive there, but not having a street entrance seems oddly anti-urban. At least the restaurant patio faces Apache.
On the other hand, maybe the idea is to promote “gentle density,” the idea that we can fit more people into an area without much height if we forego allocating so much space to parking. I hope this project succeeds, not because I think it’s perfect, but more because I don’t want any failure to be blamed on its car-free hype and thereby become an excuse to preserve mandatory parking minimums. In other words, I don’t want other developers to be forced to build excess parking if this project underperforms for reasons having nothing to do with its lack of resident parking.
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