Rose Kennedy Greenway

Why aren't the tunnel ramps covered at all? Even with just a graduated canopy-like thing? Would be cool to have a multi-layered park with some height. Some steps up to a lookout atop the ramp?
 
Probably because someone hasn't given up on developing those parcels yet?
 
Aren't the the trees really sculptural landscape elements to be looked at from afar --as from a moving car?
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Robert Moses couldn't have said it better himself. Seriously, did all our urban planners go to college in the 1930's?
 
It's the same shit in a different language.

That's why I posted the shot of half the North End being demolished to build the Artery, as if they were doing the same to directly build the RKG. The decision not to rebuild the city was tantamount to ratifying this urban carnage. Light and air! Greenspace! All we have now is is 50s planning dicta dressed up in pseudo-envirospeak bullshit.

People are misunderstanding and misapplying the word "green" in the same utterly disastrous way they misunderstood and misapplied modernism.
 
A contrarian question, then: would you remove the Paul Revere Mall (Prado) and put back the tenement blocks that were demolished to create it in the 1930s? This happened only a couple decades before the Central Artery.
 
The point isn't that every urban intervention should be corrected and replaced. Since the 1950s, we've learned a little about what works and what doesn't. The Prado was a fairly intimate intervention; it was a dangerous precedent, but it was also a limited one, and it would be mistaken to think that it necessarily endorsed a slippery slope to gargantuan spaces like City Hall Plaza (and what should more accurately be called the Rose Kennedy Plaza or Highway). It would be like saying "well, you liked Hausmann's boulevards, so why not Moses' freeways?" That would have been a legitimate intellectual trap in 1965, when planners thought they were participating in the same tradition of demolition and reconstruction, but I think we can see the difference today.

In fact, if I were in charge of rebuilding the space atop the Artery the Prado would have been one of my models of a successful public space to incorporate into the new street grid.
 
Different circumstances lead to different results, Ron. Creating a tiny park in an urban context (when there was limited open space) is a bit different than creating a system of parks that willfully ignore the city around them.
 
i just got an e-mail from my school's Architecture department. Apparently they will be constructing a giant hammock on the Greenway. Here's the link:

http://thebighammock.org/
 
I'm sorry but, that seems like a big waste of time and money.
 
Dumpster pools on Park Ave? It's designed to create class antagonism or something (they probably called it an "intervention" when it was proposed). You're certainly not going to see investment bankers coming down to take a dip. Maybe the designers just wanted the credit their project would get if more visible in Midtown. Meanwhile, people are sweltering in the neighborhoods. The money would have been better off spent strewing these around the city, or investing in existing neighborhood pools.
 
Sounds like some childish hipsters whom fancy themselves designers thought it would be cool and 'ironic' to do an installation like that. Heaven forbid the morons think beyond faddish fashion and sophomoric pseudo intellectual art statements towards creating something practical.
 
Much of what's done in NY is gimmicky (even, dare I say, the High Line), but since the city has such great and authentic urban bones, nobody seems to notice or mind. That's not to say that all gimmicks are bad (High Lane a case in point). When a gimmick is performed on the Greenway, however, it's just going to look pathetic.
 
Who cares if dumpsters on Park Ave create class antagonism -- creating something is better than nothing (like our soulless Greenway behemoth).

By these clumsy definitions I could classify Central Park in the gimmicky category. On second thought, you are right though, this is much too gimmicky for Boston which takes itself far too literal. It would never work here.
 
I think you miss my point, which is that urban interventions like these are like lipstick - it can be applied by a master make-up artist to Natalie Portman (Park Ave, not an especially noticeable feature given the rest of the beauty surrounding it, used probably to wonderful effect) or to a pig by am amateur beautician (Greenway, sticks out like a sore thumb, to bizarre and disjointed effect). Still lipstick in both instances.
 
These temporary 'gimmicks' are things that both locals and tourists may stumble upon serendipitously, and therefore are good to have in a city.
 
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