Quote:
Originally Posted by ChiTownCity
The Old design was far better than this new crap. At least with old one, if they used the right sized and textured bricks (they were going to use real bricks right?), the tower portion wouldn't really be offensive. The streetwall at the bottom had a nice variety which I would bet would of came out nice also. This new crap I'm sure would look just as cheap and crappy as the garbage like the roosevelt collections and ugly carrot orange brick crap they're calling rowhomes on the old cabrini sites. And that 1-story, as someone else mentioned, strip mall after thought they're fronting this crap with
brick always looks bad in a rendering and glass always looks nice, but that is absolutely no reason to change the design....
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No, no, no, no, and no. While I agree that at street-level the old design did a better job, the tower (while still overall it appears to be mostly so-so - although as someone pointed out if some type of metal cladding is used instead of painted flat concrete it may turn out much nicer), is much better than the first design. The former design was pure suburban town center redevelopment material, like some junk you'd expect to see in Des Plaines or Wheaton or pick your suburb. The fetish for bad postmodernism and/or traditionalism (or even mediocre of either) needs to stop.......there's a connection here to the conversation over on the highrise thread regarding what's wrong with the average infill design in Chicago, and why on some levels it does appear inferior to the avg in a city like Milwaukee.........always remember - Robert AM Stern is only 'good' in the sense that he's better than Lucien Lagrange (although with that being said, I do think the new Comcast tower in Philadelphia is pretty good - although not the best curtain wall ever, for sure.....anyway, I digress big time).......otherwise he's pretty much absolutely irrelevant to our time in the state of the art of architecture, folks.......
Seriously, Chicago deserves so much better than the likes of the old design (and all of the other Lagrange garbage and the old Loewenberg River North garbage and 80% of all the small-scale stuff that's gone up in the neighborhoods).....this city's design scene used to be about boldly turning the next page, not about trying to mimic yesterday or poorly 'blend-in' with neighborhood fabrics or appease the hordes of NIMBYs with pedestrian (or worse) taste in design........
Not to pick on you in particular, Chitown - yet you do have suspect taste in architecture, and unfortunately you're far from alone in that regard in this city...