Beton Brut
Senior Member
- Joined
- May 25, 2006
- Messages
- 4,382
- Reaction score
- 335
^ Be my guest! I was inspired by the spreadsheet I'm currently pouring over...
Home Depot has a strange staying power. It will be the last big-box store at Assembly, too.
I spend a fair amount of time in the "Waltham-Watertown corridor," and I love the handsome, purposeful Arsenal buildings. The new additions seem carelessly impermanent. I've no expectation that any developer would replicate the brick and iron trusswork of the original buildings, but what we have here is little more than an inhabitable spreadsheet.
The old arsenal buildings are beautiful and have some of the most gorgeous industrial windows around... I love the whole Navy complex between N Beacon and Arsenal.
I keep hoping that someday the mall building (I think it was the old Ann & Hope) will replace the big, arched bricked off windows on the Arsenal St side with glass again.
...but the real tragedy to me, as a biker, is the wanton giving away of the rail corridor by Waltham and Watertown. We could’ve had a rail trail straight to Moody Street, and with reasonable planning, still allowed for plenty of housing construction.
Roche Bros is going in as the grocery store, just announced today...interesting as they're putting a Brothers Marketplace (upscale concept) in nearby Waltham at the Merc and in Kendall Square
So this is Assembly Square at Watertown
I had the same thought as you, Beton Brut. This disposable cookie cutter crap that is proliferating like weeds all around the metro area is depressing. This doesn't happen in a place that cares about quality or design. This would not be built in Europe or Australia or even Chicago or Seattle or Miami. It's soulless.
I had the same thought as you, Beton Brut. This disposable cookie cutter crap that is proliferating like weeds all around the metro area is depressing. This doesn't happen in a place that cares about quality or design. This would not be built in Europe or Australia or even Chicago or Seattle or Miami. It's soulless.
It would, and it definitely is. Change the material colors/finishings and the vegetation in the renders, rinse and repeat all over the world. Boston likes to think of itself as the dumping ground for the world's bad architecture, but sadly it is not the case (just a lot of it).
Dammit; let's get a big roundtable to discover the reasons for all of this!
Taxachusetts?
socialist/ fascist antidevelopment process?
Nimby's?
Unions?
licensing/permits/ inspections/ unrelenting environmental studies' bureaucracy?
endless special interest extortion payouts?
Lord Galvin?
let's find the reasons/ bad actors and eliminate 'em!!
Let's clean up the process to our VE'd Shytte Sheau!
This would not be built in Miami. It's soulless.
Oh really? Miami builds some serious, "soulless" crap.