Riverside Development | 333 Grove Street | Newton

DZH22 said:
I understand getting rid of the labs, but a bunch of 5-over-1 landscrapers is as uninspiring as you can possibly get.

Once Vega is completed there's almost no point in coming back to this site anymore. It's just pages and pages of 5-over-1 tinderboxes. I hate clicking through most of these threads nowadays.
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I came across the perfect song for you this morning while scrolling

 
stick n move said:
I came across the perfect song for you this morning while scrolling
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The very first thing he does is badmouth the Hancock, one of my favorite buildings of all time. Not for me, and neither is instagram. It's not your fault 98% of the pipeline is complete crap and you do a nice job updating us. On the other hand your enthusiasm for some of these mediocre projects is borderline alarming. But again, thank you for your contributions.

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DZH22 said:
The very first thing he does is badmouth the Hancock, one of my favorite buildings of all time. Not for me, and neither is instagram. It's not your fault 98% of the pipeline is complete crap and you do a nice job updating us. On the other hand your enthusiasm for some of these mediocre projects is borderline alarming. But again, thank you for your contributions.
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My enthusiasm is for adding density around transit, filling in broken street walls outside the downtown core, and adding lots of new housing units throughout the city to bring prices down, not for the architectural style that most of these new projects exhibit. I thought I had made that pretty clear.
 
DBM said:
I deeply appreciate your exasperation wading through an endless sea of boring soul-crushing conformist mediocrity, but for what it's worth whatever (very very small quantity of) towers get proposed and built in Downtown (barring unforeseen economic stagnation or outright catastrophe) with the new NIMBY-crushing PLAN Downtown zoning overlay in place allowing for 500' in (highly select spots) are guaranteed not to be 5-over-1.
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Feel the same way, but want to add - people need to live somewhere. I wish these threads weren't the same thing over and over, specifically the pages we have documenting endless red tape. However, each of these are actual, real-life places that people will live, and each addition hopefully gives someone another option (or their only option) to make things work. Without these landscrapers we'd be looking at single-family homes or vacant real estate that fewer of us would be happy with.

And I'm not saying "incrementalism is good, actually" - just that some progress towards a solution can be good in and of itself, and can lay the foundation for deeper changes.
 
mssrro said:
To be fair, anyone who clicked on a Newton thread hoping for towers clearly isn't familiar with Newton, hah.
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This project, to be fair, did at one time include a 200+ foot building.
 
I know they get a lot of hate, but to be fair 5 over 1’s have been extremely successful at densifying vast swaths of cities all across america. Theyre flexible and can be adjusted for height, size, shape, and can have whatever facade you want to put on them. Looking at city after city they are almost single handedly re-densifying americas cities which were bulldozed and paved over decades ago.

Nobody likes the super crappy cheap ones that stick out like sore thumbs or the ones that are way too big and awkwardly shaped, but those give a bad name to something that has been extremely successful. Nothing inherently makes them ugly or crappy though and theres plenty of good examples. If you use crappy materials theyll look crappy, if you use good materials theyll be nice. I feel like theyre the modern day triple decker, a pretty standard form that can be adjusted to meet different needs that is relatively cheap and easy to make and are being pumped out like crazy.

Heres some examples of how cities are filling in with 5 over 1s that have been built with quality materials, massing, and street level. You could build entire cities out of these tbh and they would be perfectly nice places to live that are super dense.


Hoboken NJ
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The northern end was empty lots and parking lots, now the streetwall continues on much further.
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Its almost completely filled in now.
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Newark NJ, former empty industrial wasteland. I’m sure retail will come when it fills out more.
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Portland OR, entire neighborhoods have been brought back from the dead.
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Minneapolis MN
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Baltimore MD, filling in between historic buildings on the waterfront.
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Great examples. Why can't Boston run with Hoboken's playbook? Circular bay windows as gateways to block, solid streetwall, open end courtyard facing the side streets in a classic U-shape, and upper-end materials.
 
Very few of these buildings have any architectural merit and none of them have anything that one should consider quality materials. Apart from the structural, durability, fireproofing, soundproofing, and energy concerns, the flimsy wood system can’t actually support any facade materials. Any brick or stone you see above the first floor is a very thin set veneer, the facade equivalent of “wooden” furniture from IKEA.
 
cooper said:
Great examples. Why can't Boston run with Hoboken's playbook? Circular bay windows as gateways to block, solid streetwall, open end courtyard facing the side streets in a classic U-shape, and upper-end materials.
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I've got family in Hoboken, my impression is that overall the infill there better than Boston. Lots of small scale infill that looks modern but not aesthetically disruptive to the street wall. The larger infill buildings also have better aesthetics than Boston with more subtle variation in the streetwalls vs large expanses of blank walls or glass.
 
Jeremi said:
Very few of these buildings have any architectural merit and none of them have anything that one should consider quality materials. Apart from the structural, durability, fireproofing, soundproofing, and energy concerns, the flimsy wood system can’t actually support any facade materials. Any brick or stone you see above the first floor is a very thin set veneer, the facade equivalent of “wooden” furniture from IKEA.
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I'd rather there be a million apartments with cheap precast brick panels like this than a single multicolor monstrosity that we've been building here.
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I still can't get over the unpainted vents that make it look like the whole building has acne...
 
Looks like those hideous faux deco apartments by Quincy Adams. At least its more housing though, I guess beggars can't be choosers.
 
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