Has anyone succeeded?

J

Joe_Schmoe

Active Member
Joined
May 25, 2006
Messages
374
Reaction score
0
Can anyone name or post a picture of a building with a large footprint that you feel does a good job of breaking up its mass so that the street level is varied and interesting and not monotonous? I'm just curious, I am not familiar with any examples that have come up with a good solution to this problem.
 
Always been a fan of the Park Plaza Hotel. A building doesn't need to break up it's mass to work, it just needs to be scaled properly.

I always felt that the Marriott Long Wharf would work better if it had some design elements which gave it better scale. The hotel was modeled after the warehouses in the area but it lacks the human scale that the older buildings do like vertical elements, a better base and top. You could do a lot with that building.
 
Do you consider Quincy Market, North Market, and South Market to be single buildings, or collections of attached buildings?
 
They are, technically, single buildings mandated to be built identically.
 
Well, what do you mean by large? In Portland, we have One City Center, at 140 feet tall (13 stories) which scales down on one side in a stepped fashion to blend in with the historic 4 story buildings it is surrounded by. It also has street level retail on that side, but on the opposite side is just a blank wall.
one%20city%20center.jpg


For a larger city example, I think (without having been to confirm) that Vancouver is all about having high rises top interesting low rise street level structures.
DolceApartments-535-smithe.jpg


Not sure if that was the answer you were looking for or if you meant it to be a Boston specific inquiry. Hope that helps a little though.
 
I think I may have originally misinterpreted your question. The way I now understand it seems like you are referring even to low rise structures, and are asking if there are large layout structures of any sort that can achieve the diversity commonly associated with tiny footprint buildings. In that case, I don't have any examples. The repetitiveness of architectural style across larger structures is necessary for continuity in overall design, but ends up being less interesting to look at. Sometimes Walmart tried to break up its mass by looking like a bunch of country houses strung together and as we can imagine it is a total failure.
 
What I had in mind was something like Avenir or the Mandarin where they try to break up the mass to give the impression of a traditional variegated streetscape such as this:
street.jpg


But modern examples always seems to fail imo because the architect it always too committed to retaining the unity of his structure. I was wondering if there were any successes of blending the two, or just faking it and putting a variety of facades on it.
 
There's a building in Portsmouth which is relatively new infill (is it on Congress Street?) that does a good job at this. It is large in only a relative sense, but well designed to look more like a couple of buildings instead of one long one. It replaced a gas station or something in the middle of the city. Looks great.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top