Hope Point Tower (Fane) | 250 Dyer Street | Providence

Lrfox

Lrfox

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So a new developer has proposed 3 towers on I-195 land. 33,43 and 55 stories. To call this ambitious is an understatement. Is it realistic? No. but it will be interesting to see what comes of it

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PROVIDENCE, R.I. — An out-of-state developer wants to build three high-end residential towers on former Route 195 land, with the tallest at 55 stories — far higher than anything else in the city and beyond what's currently allowed under city zoning regulations.
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http://www.providencejournal.com/news/20161114/three-skyscrapers-proposed-for-former-195-land
 
Hell yah!!

Is there a market for this? Providence rents are much lower than Boston.

They need to renovate the Superman building first. Sad that the tallest building in RI is vacant.
 
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Holy shit these towers are awful. With "architecture" this fucking bad, you'd think they rose Michael Graves from the dead to design this garbage. By all means, this is a great spot to go tall & maybe even get a new icon for Providence, but not like this.

*Architecture in quotes because this is not architecture.
 
datadyne007 said:
Holy shit these towers are awful. With "architecture" this fucking bad, you'd think they rose Michael Graves from the dead to design this garbage. By all means, this is a great spot to go tall & maybe even get a new icon for Providence, but not like this.

*Architecture in quotes because this is not architecture.
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Great Moses Brown's ghost you ain't kidding. Just heinous. They literally look like snap-together lego sets or something, some kind of children's playset materials... awful.
 
^haha yeah, they're awful. And they'd dominate the skyline and cityscape. I'm hoping a final version with better high rise and podium components (and something closer to the scale of the rest of the city- although a new tallest here is fine) comes from this. But it looks like the developer is legit, so this may end up being something- just not... that.
 
On one hand, I absolutely love the ambition and am really chomping at the bit to see Providence get some new high-impact development. On the other hand, UGLY!!!!!!!!
 
Those look like something Nanjing or Incheon shat out.

But A+ for effort and let's hope something reasonably big comes out of this.
 
It brings to mind the Empire State Plaza in Albany. I like the vision, but the Lego design needs some work.
 
Dr. StrangeHat said:
It brings to mind the Empire State Plaza in Albany. I like the vision, but the Lego design needs some work.
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It looks to me like they took 45 Province (although this is allegedly brick, not terracotta), copy and pasted two more, and stretched them to varying degrees. What's more is that this is a 1 acre lot... they're really squeezing a lot into such a small footprint.

I took a look at the Fane Organization's website. For starters, it's crap. Nothing about it says "We're a real company!"- right down to over-stretched (blurry) images, and terribly written copy. For example:

The Fane Organization is a family-run business specializing in real estate management and development. It's properties are located in New York City, Ithaca New York, and Toronto Canada, while this dynamic organization continues its efforts in actively building and expanding its portfolio. The Fane Organization is motivated by long-term commitment, integrity and solid values. They bring reliability, style, sound economics and vision for the future to their projects.
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So yeah, I wouldn't put much stock in Fane being able to do much here. Their "portfolio" (if you can call it that) consists of mostly small developments in NYC, Ithaca and Toronto. The only large scale development they've been involved with is the Chaz Yorkville in Toronto which is fairly significant, but while it's listed on Fane's porfolio, Fane isn't mentioned anywhere else I've seen the project details.

I want to believe something decent will come of this, but it does seem like (as GCPVD put it) Vaporscrapers.
 
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Wow. That site is amateur hour at its most gruesome. Like they paid some high school kid $500 and a single-digit percent of traffic proceeds to fill-in-blanks on a generic site template and be their webmaster that tests it on the latest version of Chrome. How do they expect to network with any city's local businesses or community that way?


Also...FOR FUCKS SAKE, grade-school punctuation! Grade-school punctuation! On the front-page copy! It takes 8 seconds to download a browser grammar checker for that.
facepalm.gif
 
^Unnecessary apostrophes, missing commas, run-ons, and the awkwardly executed third-person description made me cringe. But my favorite part was the useless Toronto landing page. It's literally a picture of the CN tower and this text, "Toronto..." No links, no description of the work they've done there or the relationship to the city. Just a single image of a structure that's clearly not theirs and "Toronto..." To their credit, however, at least the image isn't a thumbnail blown up to the point of being unrecognizable. They saved that for the Harlem page.
 
I'm feeling agnostic about the height. But whatever the height, I would hope for a good urban and human-scaled street level with quality design and a variety of active storefronts. My dream would be to see something like Boston's Atlantic Wharf recreated on this site (or others on land vacated by the highway project): A modern tower atop traditional blocks that are woven seamlessly into the urban fabric.

aw-5.jpg


In the case of Atlantic Wharf, the base consists of three pre-existing buildings that were restored and rehabbed. So in this case of the proposed Providence triple towers, I am talking apples and oranges. But it is the best example I could think of where a modern tower has a human-scaled and traditionally urban base.
 
Lrfox said:
^Unnecessary apostrophes, missing commas, run-ons, and the awkwardly executed third-person description made me cringe. But my favorite part was the useless Toronto landing page. It's literally a picture of the CN tower and this text, "Toronto..." No links, no description of the work they've done there or the relationship to the city. Just a single image of a structure that's clearly not theirs and "Toronto..." To their credit, however, at least the image isn't a thumbnail blown up to the point of being unrecognizable. They saved that for the Harlem page.
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If you visit the Our Team page, you get a mobile UX too:

http://faneorg.com/our-team.html

Funny thing is the domain was registered in 2014, so it's not like someone spat this out over night. Even funnier - there's a Quantcast tracker in place, meaning the site owners not only thought they would get enough traffic to monetize, but that the volume would be big enough to necessitate audience segmenting. And someone is paying for that service, too!
 
Yea that website couldn't get much worse then it is. The big thing that struck me was the odd font they chose for the header of the homepage.

Lrfox said:
So yeah, I wouldn't put much stock in Fane being able to do much here. Their "portfolio" (if you can call it that) consists of mostly small developments in NYC, Ithaca and Toronto. The only large scale development they've been involved with is the Chaz Yorkville in Toronto which is fairly significant, but while it's listed on Fane's porfolio, Fane isn't mentioned anywhere else I've seen the project details.
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I believe Jason Fane is the founder of the 45 Charles Ltd. stakeholder/developer of the site.
 
TheBostonian said:
I'm feeling agnostic about the height. But whatever the height, I would hope for a good urban and human-scaled street level with quality design and a variety of active storefronts. My dream would be to see something like Boston's Atlantic Wharf recreated on this site (or others on land vacated by the highway project): A modern tower atop traditional blocks that are woven seamlessly into the urban fabric.

aw-5.jpg


In the case of Atlantic Wharf, the base consists of three pre-existing buildings that were restored and rehabbed. So in this case of the proposed Providence triple towers, I am talking apples and oranges. But it is the best example I could think of where a modern tower has a human-scaled and traditionally urban base.
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My biggest fear with this development is just how dead this section of the city really is. I know this is an area that will be developed over the next 10 years or so, but this area is really quite barron otherwise. Between where Point Street Bar is and then the area where G-Pub is there isn't much to really attract anything to this development. I think they would need to include more than just the 1-acre site in the re-development and somehow get a partner in maybe re-devloping at least the street scape here to go along with this whole project
 
Pulled a render from the providence journal. Jesus this is ugly. I don't see it being built out like this, but at least they're looking to the sky for once. Should be interesting to see where this goes.

I reaaaaaaally hope it is not built like this. Providence has a very nice skyline for a small city, this would be a disaster. This is their chance to make a huge statement. Don't let that statement be "holy shit what the hell is that really tall piece of crap over there".

Something I like about Providence is that the hills make the city very visible from many areas all around the city. The skyline is very prominent for how short it is. If they get a 600 footer that would be multiplied by 1000. Im excited to see them looking to go for it, but just not like this....


https://postimage.org/
 
stick n move said:
Pulled a render from the providence journal. Jesus this is ugly. I don't see it being built out like this, but at least they're looking to the sky for once. Should be interesting to see where this goes.

I reaaaaaaally hope it is not built like this. Providence has a very nice skyline for a small city, this would be a disaster. This is their chance to make a huge statement. Don't let that statement be "holy shit what the hell is that really tall piece of crap over there".

Something I like about Providence is that the hills make the city very visible from many areas all around the city. The skyline is very prominent for how short it is. If they get a 600 footer that would be multiplied by 1000. Im excited to see them looking to go for it, but just not like this....


https://postimage.org/
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two things. The park in the foreground of this picture was to have been the location of the new Pawsox stadium. Also, you will see an inlet and that has been proposed to go 1/4 to 1/2 mile in toward the city to provide more waterfront.
 
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