89 Elm Street | Port Properties Bayside Phase 1B | Portland

Personally, I don't think the government should have have a say in building design beyond stewardship of public safety and finite public resources like sewer capacity.
 
100% disagree that lower cost DOES NOT have to mean a sacrifice in aesthetics/design. Kaplan Thompson built the award winning Passivhaus Friends School in Yarmouth for only $4 million. What does Portland now pay for a school to be built? $50 million?
 
TC_zoid said:
100% disagree that lower cost DOES NOT have to mean a sacrifice in aesthetics/design. Kaplan Thompson built the award winning Passivhaus Friends School in Yarmouth for only $4 million. What does Portland now pay for a school to be built? $50 million?
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Don't public schools have about 10x the number of students and have to pay prevailing wages?
 
PlantArch said:
But it's in my favorite color palette, Soviet Bloc Greige! Architects are supposed to be creative beings but a good portion of them are just spitting out cookie cutter crap. The planning board needs to step up and demand better. You will not get anything more attractive unless you mandate it.
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Portsmouth, NH is doing a much better job in that regard.
 
matt.greeson said:
Don't public schools have about 10x the number of students and have to pay prevailing wages?
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3-4 times the size of the Friends School (139 students). Private schools generally pay higher wages.
 
TC_zoid said:
3-4 times the size of the Friends School (139 students). Private schools generally pay higher wages.
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"Private schools often pay better than charter schools as well as offer benefits that are more competitive. However, private school teachers still, on average, make less than their public school counterparts do. It may sound odd that private school teachers make less than public school teachers do, but really, it’s just a simple matter of Economics 101. Basically, the main reason private school teachers get paid less is that there is less of a demand for private school teachers than public schools; lower demand = lower pay. It might be surprising, but out of public, private, and charter schools, public school teachers make the most."

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Just to be clear, I was talking about prevailing wages applicable to public sector construction projects, but yes, private school teachers usually make less.
 
There's also a wide variance in the resources available to private schools. Compare Waynflete to St. Brigid's, for instance. I've said in the past that the only job from which becoming a public school teacher is a pay raise, is being a parochial school teacher.
 
I stand corrected. Interesting, the pay differences with private schools as compared to public. Although working in a private school probably has some other benefits, or certainly in a large city one (e.g., more amenable students to teach and a safer place to be), I decided to do some related exploration. In reference to the recent PPH editorial about administration pay in the University of Maine system, in which the chancellor is going to make an 800K salary with a 200K bonus (yes, a cool million), the average university chancellor salary in the United States is 297K. I'd say being a public teacher of any kind in Maine is the way to go.
 
cneal said:
Speaking of creativity, I would love to read a critique that doesn't resort to Red Scare cliches while complaining about affordable housing.

In fairness, though, it's pretty funny if you think that the solution to this imaginary problem is to have a government committee mandate the "correct" form of architecture
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It is not an imaginary problem. If allowed, corporations will take the cheapest route to the end product. Mandating architectural design standards is a more and more common practice resulting in a more attractive built environment. Tell me, which of these is more desirable?
 

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Utilities are not underground? What a shame! I am still waiting the Federated project to take off. Or at least the vacant lot has something put there. Put the new arena there (capacity with ice at 12k) for when the arena opens in 2045 there will be plenty of pedestrian foot traffic.
 
Seanflynn78 said:
Utilities are not underground? What a shame! I am still waiting the Federated project to take off. Or at least the vacant lot has something put there.....
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You're going to be waiting a while...Every iteration of Midtown is fully and completely dead and the parcels are locked in indefinitely legal disputes that nobody seems to be in a hurry to resolve.
 
Throughout the public process for this project many of the neighbors and abutters stated that they would support two smaller buildings that were each 1-2 stories taller but with a ~50 ft gap along Elm St to break the massing. In a dream world this would be two 9-10 story buildings rather than one monolithic 7-8 story building but I can understand why it was designed this way.

Two buildings means duplication of services (Elevators, stairwells, Fire suppression, HVAC, shared space) Plus going up even an extra story would probably have necessitated steel construction which of course is much more expensive...as well as a zoning change for additional height. The developers really had to thread the needle to get this project to pencil out and I'm pleased we're getting 200 affordable units in the heart of the peninsula. It's not perfect, but we shouldn't be letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
 
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Cosakita18 said:
Throughout the public process for this project many of the neighbors and abutters stated that they would support two smaller buildings that were each 1-2 stories taller but with a ~50 ft gap along Elm St to break the massing. In a dream world this would be two 9-10 story buildings rather than one monolithic 7-8 story building but I can understand why it was designed this way.

Two buildings means duplication of services (Elevators, stairwells, Fire suppression, HVAC, shared space) Plus going up even an extra story would probably have necessitated steel construction which of course is much more expensive...as well as a zoning change for additional height. The developers really had to thread the needle to get this project to pencil out and I'm pleased we're getting 200 affordable units in the heart of the peninsula. It's not perfect, but we shouldn't be letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
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If they could find it in the budget to add some depth to the windows and have actual differentiation in depth where the materials change, it would really help a lot to reduce the monolithic effect. I also wish they would consider moving the rooftop 'arcade' from the lowest part of the site to a higher part of the site, up the block – again to help add more variation to the blocky block. That said, I agree that, while not perfect, the real benefit is that this is going to bring a lot of residential product onto the peninsula and that is currently more valuable than aesthetics.

But here's what I mean about the rooftop 'arcade' moving up-hill, to emphasize the difference in grade (edited from the architects image from another post in the thread):
89 Elm Street with moved rooftop arcade.png
 
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