Re: Hayward Place
Empty lot < Bad Building < OK Building < Great Building
Hayward Place is a Bad Building. I think an OK Building would be better for the sight.
Bad Buildings belong out on 128 (if at all).
Edit: Ron, looking at the rendering, I would say "poorly".
Stat -- another apropos quote from a Robert Campbell Boston Globe Column (about the Yawkee Cancer Care Center at Dana Farber
" There are at least three ways any building can be good. First, it can be a wonderful place to inhabit, to live in or work in, or maybe see a performance in. Second, it can be a beautiful object as viewed from outside, a kind of sculpture, like the Taj Mahal or Hancock Tower. Or third, it can take on the tougher job of helping to shape and invigorate a larger public space......the third that matters to the general public. Good cities are made of good streets. Looked at this way, the role of urban buildings is to make the walls that shape the street spaces. Streets are the public rooms in which we spend much of our lives, moving through them as we drive, bus, bike, walk, shop, gather, or just people-watch.
Think of Commonwealth Avenue, where the house facades wear stiff and fancy architectural uniforms and are lined up on both sides like troops on parade. As architecture Commonwealth Avenue is pretty good, but as urban design it?s magnificent. The facades function as the paneled walls of a world class urban room.......Good cities, as noted above, are made of good streets. The buildings that shape our streets must respond to that imperative.... "
These are good observations by Campbell that should help define the definition of "good citizenship" for anomous (e.g. small in-fill), semi-visible (larer sites on main streets), and of course important buildings standing out because of where they are (e.g. on a major street corner, etc.).
With this kind of attention to providing the "walls to a street room" -- DTX can return to is former goodness -- even as we wait for the signature piece to fill the Filene's Hole
