GrandMarc Residence Hall (YMCA) @ Northeastern U | 291 St. Botolph Street | Fenway

joebos said:
Uhm, wow.

I don't expect every building to be groundbreaking. I do think we can expect more out of architecture, especially with a building of this size and presence in this neighborhood.
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+1
 
joebos said:
And your point is?

So educate me, is this building out of scale for the plaza? There's no relationship between the elements in this space? It's the same context?
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Are you really chastising someone who took the time to walk however far to Huntington @ Belvedere, take the photo, upload it, and post it?

As someone who regular contributes photos to this forum, I'm more than a little biased, but this forum would be worse off were it not for the efforts of the many talented and dedicated photographers who walk around the city and enrich our topics with their work. Do some of these add more information and contribute more to the discussion than others? Perhaps so.

I'm sorry you think that timsox's photo doesn't add to the discussion at all, but when you think that it adds nothing, doesn't it make more sense to say nothing? As opposed to berating someone for taking the time and effort to do something for others on their own time and volition?

I apologize if I am being preachy, and for going off-topic, but I feel this needs to be said. If you don't have anything nice to say, or constructive to add, why say anything?
 
There are many other threads where this photo could be posted, downburst. I'm a photographer myself, I have nothing against taking images and sharing them. If it's posted in here I ASSUME it's for the purpose of contributing to the conversation about the GrandMarc. Especially following a conversation about the awkward scale of the building. So if I misunderstood it's partially the fault of the person who posted the image.
 
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For Helix's sake, all he did was post a photo of the building. Chill dude. The photo actually does contribute to the discussion because it shows how the building appears from a certain vantage point. That's the point of all the photos we take and post on this board in every single thread. That photo from afar actually tells a lot. It tells us that it doesn't appear to tower over its surroundings from afar (because of Symphony Towers) and that it contributes to the Huntington skyline.

Thanks for the photo Timsox. Keep it up as you always have.
 
My, my. Well, to be frank I was really just posting this photo because I was walking back to NU from downtown and thought that this was a cool angle that I hadn't seen before on here.

Also, though, I can easily find plenty of photos on here-- which are visually interesting, have sharp colors, are from interesting angles or far away, show the building from different perspectives, or just show the progress of construction-- that have no argument behind them. They're just fun to look at.

But, since I've been asked, I was thinking that it is interesting that 1) the GrandMarc has almost identical massing to the Symphony Towers. 2) That it is so visible from so far away and such a variety of angles, but that 3) at the same time, plenty of people in Boston will never notice it (as evidenced by the much larger, more up-close CSC administration tower).
 
Someone was asking if this building has a good side a little while back. Didn't take a photo, but if you take the back entrance to the Mass Ave. T station and look out over the tracks, the GrandMarc actually looks pretty damn good.
 
joebos said:
And your point is?
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His point was to post a picture that contained the GrandMarc somewhere within it. He was successful.

On the other hand, your "rebuttal" (or whatever the heck you meant it to be) to his picture was an abject failure.
 
timsox6 said:
My, my. Well, to be frank I was really just posting this photo because I was walking back to NU from downtown and thought that this was a cool angle that I hadn't seen before on here.

Also, though, I can easily find plenty of photos on here-- which are visually interesting, have sharp colors, are from interesting angles or far away, show the building from different perspectives, or just show the progress of construction-- that have no argument behind them. They're just fun to look at.

But, since I've been asked, I was thinking that it is interesting that 1) the GrandMarc has almost identical massing to the Symphony Towers. 2) That it is so visible from so far away and such a variety of angles, but that 3) at the same time, plenty of people in Boston will never notice it (as evidenced by the much larger, more up-close CSC administration tower).
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Timsox, only one poster had a problem with it. The rest of us appreciated the photo and I really like the perspective from down the street.

Please keep it up.
 
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Yup...well, the fire escape staircase on the outside of Marshall's.
 
I'll take a shot ... at least in part.

This building could be 75% better without even fiddling with the massing, height, or overall size, and simply devoting a tiny bit of attention to materials, palette, and surface articulation.

This essentially looks like a Home Depot that has been pitched up twenty stories. Similar cheap-looking puke colored panels, the same flatness, similar two-tone scheme. In fairness to Home Depot, the panels used in their big box DIY centers seem less mottled and have better color match, so the two-tone beigeish contrast comes off more cleanly and clearly. Also, many Home Depots offer an attempt at a cornice, and their corporate orange provides a better/stronger contrast to the two-tone beige/puke, creating some visual interest. Indeed, if you took this dorm and added a couple of orange stripes and three windowless stories with big Home Depot signage on top, capped by a faux cornice, it would complete the strip mall aesthetic and give the architects on the board something to talk about ... instead of "Learning from Las Vegas" we could demonstrate "Learning from Jacksonville." In my view, this would be an improvement, and I'm not being (entirely) tongue in cheek. Can we at least add an orange stripe on top?

Failing that, would that they had given a bit of three-dimensionality to the windows, made at least some attempt to define the roofline and given a moment's actual thought into the color scheme ... would have worked wonders. With respect to the latter, if the goal was to keep it cheap but blend into the background, a palette more grey and less Home Depot would have been far better ... although as we have seen down the street, bold colors and a bit of imagination with shapes and surfaces can lend a precast-panel building quite a bit of interest and dynamism.

Of course, in an ideal world, you could make the building even better by fussing with the massing, perhaps adding some set-backs, trading a bit of height for shape and creating more of a "backdrop" for the Y in the sense that the Hancock provides a "backdrop" for the old Hancock. But that would have cost real money to pull off. What really pisses me off about this building is that the modest improvements I sketch out above, while not costless, couldn't possibly add more than what ... 2 or 3% to the cost of a building of this size? This looks like it was thrown up by a team that just didn't care.

It's ironic that in the '90s we marveled at how fresh and wonderful the Northeastern developments were compared to what was being constructed at Harvard, BU, and BC ... fast forward twenty years and while Northeastern (in this case, with a commercial partner-in-crime) has gone steadily in reverse, better architecture is demonstrated up further down Huntington Avenue by Mass Pharma, Wentworth, and (especially) MassArt. It's as if there is a negative correlation with institutional prestige.
 
Are they cleaning and repairing the façade of the YMCA or just repairing the cornice.
 
Can someone with knowledge of this explain to me what the theory is behind randomly placed panels of ever-so-slight color variations? It looks horrible to me in every instance. I get the theory behind going lighter as you go higher, but the random application turns into a sloppy looking mess. What am I missing?
 
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