Facade Massing Techniques

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dbartman

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Three projects in Chinatown all breakdown their facades to appear as smaller buildings even though they are larger footprints: Park Essex/Archstone, Residences at Kensington, and Parcel 24.

Has anyone seen examples of this in other cities? What's your opinion?

I'vee seen this calm neighbors and contribute toward the appearance of streetscapes rather nicely.

Has anyone every seen this required by code or design guidelines?

Pics:












 
Not just those but pretty much everything being built in the Fenway has the same massing.
 
I personally love it. When done right, it prevents the "superblock" feeling. (ie. not the Transportation Building) It's highly effective in the Fenway.
 
Just a feeling though. No substitute for actual varied storefronts/offices/residences.
 
I'm a fan of these techniques. I think a lot of the charm of older cities comes from the smaller and more human-scaled proportions of the buildings (both vertically and horizontally). It seems like most new construction these days takes up entire blocks, perhaps due to some combination of economics, zoning, and other things I am not knowledgeable enough to speak about.

An decent example (although the project has been cancelled, I believe) in Portland, Maine:

scaled.php
 
Extortion letter architecture. I personally despise it and look forward to its end.
 
The only thing that makes you happy is architecture which crushes and despises humanity, eh?

:p
 
Not even a little, Matthew.

There is nothing crushing in the work of Aalto, Saarinen, Wright, or Niemeyer.
 
Are there any contemporary architects which you would consider acceptable?
 
Rafael Moneo, Alvaro Siza, Richard Rodgers, Norman Foster, Shigeru Ban, Moshe Safdie, Ken Yeang, Zaha Hadid, Richard Meier, Jeanne Gang, Tadao Ando, Antoine Predock, Hans Hollein...

Should I keep going?
 
I had to look-up some of those architects on Wikipedia... and I dunno, I didn't really appreciate most of the stuff. There were a few good samples sprinkled throughout, but a lot of the structures looked like academic wankery rather than functional buildings.
 
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