Re: Millennium Place III | Hayward Place
You need to stop spending all your time sucking on Rush's tit. You are really wacked, completely ill informed and certainly not worth arguing with. Go back to fox news, you've said nothing new in years.
Few forums are going to be interested in a fusion of politics with architecture and planning. Especially on a 'hyperlocal' scale, particularly involving Boston.
With that said, the amount of politics is a bit excessive. And no, BostonObserver isn't the only to blame.
Fixed that for you, BostonUrbEx.
We would all love to have an environment where politics does not so heavily impact our ability to construct buildings; the type of structures that are built; the way they look; their height and shape; the amount of funding from you and me that different buildings receive from our, ahem, representatives in government; or which developers are allowed to build and which not. Of course, then we would be living in a libertarian society, so to get to that apolitical point, we would have to make very substantial political changes.
The fact of the matter is that we live in a highly politicized country and city, where regulations (often created, and enforced, at will by bureaucrats who have their own ideological or personal agendas) heavily affect our built environment. This can be for the better (as in the case of historical landmarking) or the worse (in pretty much any other case, IMO, although at times I find myself wishing for an "Ugliness Board of Review" that can strike down proposed buildings for hideousness rather than height, until I remember the politicized and, ultimately, terrible judgments that would come out of such a monstrosity).
This project in particular does much to illustrate the evils of the highly bureaucratic environment for the built environment that exists under Mayor Menino. Without going into the details (they're available via a nice summary by Shirley Kressel
here), this site shows that it's hard, in a society where bureaucrats play a large role as in the US today and particularly in Boston, to separate architecture, as manifested in contemporary building projects, from politics.
And although I don't listen to the guy either, if you want less politics in real estate/architecture, you'd be better off listening to Rush Limbaugh than reading the Globe