Avenir

Ron Newman said:
And this will be the first time ever that Canal Street has buildings on both sides. The east side was a canal, then a railroad, then the Green Line and Orange Line elevateds.
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There was actually a bulding there before Avenir, although you can be forgiven for not remembering it. It was a small, unremarkable one story building that I believe had MBTA offices in it.
 
I'm going to have to disagree with the other posters and say this is pretty awful.
It's shocking to me that today's architects haven't figured out a way to replicate the variety and charm of a traditional streetscape. This is the best we have come up with?!

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I'm not saying that I want to create a replica of a traditional main street by doing cheap imitations of traditional facades, but surely someone can come up with a better solution. Or, maybe not. No one has done it yet.
 
Joe,
Photos don't do justice to the Canal Street facade because it is so damned big. And I agree with you in so far as the aluminum siding on the upper floors is a bit cheap looking. But it is surprizing how much better Canal Street looks with it, and the comforting sense of enclosure that it and the buildings on the other side of the street give to the pedestrian.
Toby
 
I went by it when I was up this week. I don't know what I think of it anymore. The massing is nice but the finished product looks plasticy, almost like it was made out of Legos. It won't be so bad when other buildings are filled in but right now it is a pretty heinous land-scraper. It actually looks like a ship.
 
that thing is just massive....looks like a school building or a thoughtful housing project

what are the sales numbers looking like for this development?

if I just guessed without any sort of rigor I would say they are going to have trouble selling a lot of these units.....
 
Looks like a factory...for living.

I was actually on Canal St. last night, and this landscraper is as depressing in real-life as it is in the photos.
 
What you have here is a facade not intended to be seen as a unit like that. There will eventually be a similar building (or set of buildings) of equal height on the other side of the street, cutting off that view.
 
Joe_Schmoe said:
It's shocking to me that today's architects haven't figured out a way to replicate the variety and charm of a traditional streetscape. This is the best we have come up with?!

I'm not saying that I want to create a replica of a traditional main street by doing cheap imitations of traditional facades, but surely someone can come up with a better solution. Or, maybe not. No one has done it yet.
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Sure ... small-increment footprints.

If it's big, it's big; if it's small, it's small.

Tricks only fool you if you're very, very dumb.

See Rotterdam.
 
Ron Newman said:
There will eventually be a similar building (or set of buildings) of equal height on the other side of the street, cutting off that view.
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Key word.

Lots of 'eventuallys' in this town.
 
small-increment footprints
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The lack of these is the number one problem with the Seaport, Kendall, and this area.

But diagnosing this problem is one thing, solving it another...
 
Incentives in the form of additional FAR are presently provided by the BRA to those who assemble very large parcels.

If instead they reversed themselves and provided FAR bonuses to those willing to develop small, unprofitable parcels, the problem would be addressed.
 
This is going to be a rental building.

Bubbybu said:
that thing is just massive....looks like a school building or a thoughtful housing project

what are the sales numbers looking like for this development?

if I just guessed without any sort of rigor I would say they are going to have trouble selling a lot of these units.....
Click to expand...
 
Incentives in the form of additional FAR are presently provided by the BRA to those who assemble very large parcels.

If instead they reversed themselves and provided FAR bonuses to those willing to develop small, unprofitable parcels, the problem would be addressed.
Click to expand...

Or we could not have a board of central planning for development, to screw things up, in the first place.
 
Incentives in the form of additional FAR are presently provided by the BRA to those who assemble very large parcels.
Click to expand...

What's the philosophy behind this?

Or we could not have a board of central planning for development, to screw things up, in the first place.
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As if Boston's developers would suddenly be building a contemporary Amsterdam if government oversight were abolished rather than reformed...

Fifty years of inertia in the development community is unlikely to reverse itself without legal and regulatory obstacles and incentives being tweaked to make it so.

If you don't believe me, go to Houston to see what a postwar libertarian planning ethos hath wrought.
 
Blockbusters would still be built because of offices having a torrid affair with fat floor plates. It's become ingrained in the management culture to have entire offices on one floor or as few floors as possible in order to supervise employees. The old idea was that people would be less productive spread out over several floors apart from the leering eyes of the boss.

Advances in air conditioning and cheap lighting only made things worse.

Now given that fat floor plates lend themselves to cubicle hell, where everyone is isolated anyway, and computers allow for different kinds of supervision, the only plausible reasons the old thin multi-floor office plans haven't had a renaissance is legacy management culture.
 
You are absolutely correct with that last statement. Why do you think most all new schools are built as one-story affairs spread out over far too many acres?
 
Damn those one-story schools! I always wanted to go to Wayside School instead.

"It's really simple, children, those going up the stairs stay to the right and those going down stay to the left! Why is this causing problems?"
 
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