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Originally Posted by Troubadour
Describing how the vagaries of developmental cycles contribute to the suppression of high-quality architecture, and how it's sometimes set up to fail when it is attempted.
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If I am reading this right, this is the difference between building something small for the individual compared to buildings something large for the masses. Most cities want to have input on what is to be built in their own city because like the building, they too have to live with it. Often times these suppressions are put in place to protect other things, such as historic buildings, key site lines, or park space, or whatever. Here in Portland you can only technically build so tall in order to protect light getting to the street because we value our limited amount of sunlight here.
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Not really interested in bad architecture. I did note that selection bias plays a role in the perception that great projects end up falling through proportionally more often than merely good, mediocre, or ridiculous ones. But it does seem there is an economic basis for the "curse" rooted in how such projects are selected in the first place.
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That kind of falls under the "if you can't pay for it" rule. If you can't pay for it, why should we? Often times banks do not like to lend to experimental things, they prefer "safe" bets (though this past decade would suggest otherwise, but that is a different topic.) I would assume many of your favorite buildings happened at the peak or at the beginning of the fall of a bubble because that is usually the moment where people feel they are indestructible. I remember the peak of the housing bubble where people seemed to think anything was possible and real estate values were going to continue to rise forever. So much of this "curse" you are talking about seems to be more about timing and luck, more than anything else.
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I was reflecting on the Chicago Spire - a very magical project that would have fundamentally altered the spirit of the Chicago skyline - and started wondering why that of all things ended up failing completely when so many other imperiled projects were able to be put on functional hold, and still others ended up being completed after a hiatus. It wasn't merely an awesome and mythic design, but physically gigantic, putting the US back in the height game. So its loss was a big gut-punch to this country's relevance at the upper end of both the creativity and height scales.
When Pingan, another awesome giant, ground to a halt while silly projects all around it were being completed, I started wondering if there's some kind of pattern to this. And there is. Very simply, the conditions that motivate developers to go for such projects are precisely those which imperil them - the climate of commodity saturation where aesthetics and prestige take on maximum value.
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The Chicago Spire was doomed from the start because it was completely unrealistic. I am sure a lot of people loved it and would of loved seeing it go up, but the basis of the tower was that it was completely residential (if I remember correctly), and that each unit was a unique custom design by the architect. Basically you were looking at an architect's wet dream in the making, to have complete control over every detail, which is fine on the small scale and happens everyday, but at the large scale towers are profitable when they are able to mass fabricate. From the start, I never thought it was actually going to be built, I was surprised when I actually saw them dig the foundation. But even with the Spire being canceled, there were still more than enough amazing projects going up in this country, and I would say some of the best architecture in this country was built in the past ten years, so it doesn't bother me to see a couple of these projects fall through. There is more to a great city than height, but even still a number of cities in this country did in fact increase their building height.
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Nevertheless, not all daydreams are all equal. And the handful of the best that ever come within a light-year of being realized always seem to have a giant target painted on them the whole time. Again, because the conditions that make them attractive to money people in the first place are the ones that make them proportionally more likely to fall through once set in motion.
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Well this is very true, but I was more referring to the visionary and unbuilt project that were actually close or a possibility of actually being built, and not all daydreams in general. (just to clarify) But this statement is where I was making the paint brush comment about, this is a blanket statement that sounds like it encompasses all architecture as if nothing visionary is ever built anymore, and with that, I have to disagree. I think only a small portion of these "cursed" buildings are never built, and often times it is to the blame of the developer who was never really serious about building something like this or willing to take on the full risk to see something through.