Roux Institute Campus Development | Portland

DanielPWM19 said:
I very much agree. With the Hospital and Art Museum, we need interesting and attractive architecture to bring the city forward. People balked at the facade of the Hyatt on Fore Street, but I kind of like that it's different.
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I actually really like the contract of the Hyatt against the old brick. And now with the garage renovation, one side of the street is modern and the other classic brick. I love that section of town - more of that please.
 
PlantArch said:
This thing is as much a monstrosity as the USM Law Building.
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Refer to the article link. The students love it (the inside). The truly best arch is more about the inside than the outside. It's for people to use, not just look at from across the street. But yes, the old law building fails on both levels.
 
A post from the arch development section for Boston regarding this "Jenga building"...

The great medieval cathedrals, the sculptor Auguste Rodin wrote, are built on “the principle of living bodies,” the bodily harmony that results from “the counterbalancing of masses that move.” The Jenga building — its suggestion of unbalanced mass — throws off my own sense of balance. It does more than disrupt the skyline — it disrupts the relationship of my body to the earth.

Meanwhile, Jenga-style buildings are a thing — there are examples in New York, Austin, and Vancouver, and more on the way. (BU prefers comparison to a stack of books.) Andrew Witt, an associate professor in practice of architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, said in an e-mail that the building “invites you to see it in the round” and lauded the spiral arrangement of those Jenga blocks. “Together,” he wrote, “the shuffled volumes, spiral twist, and shimmering facade allow the building to show many faces to the city, creating an effect that is both rational and elusive.”

OK, so maybe I’ll get used to — or even learn to love — BU’s new building. When I recently took a walk around the building, I was surprised to find it less imposing from the sidewalk and not nearly as unsettling. I took in the play of light on its reflective surfaces, the alternating patterns of verticals and diagonals. It was dazzling. So maybe Boston’s most spectacular new building will also someday not be its scariest.
 
Looks like we may have the first construction work on site soon - some demo. Unclear from the documents in CSS why this is necessary now, since any real work seems to be far off. Maybe some structural work to the Cannery Building needs to happen sooner than later? They do mentioned they are in the process of hiring an architect for the design of the Cannery Building. Here's the diagram from the HP packet:

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Best destruction tease I think I've ever seen.
 
It'd be a "pity" if an accidental fire destroyed the Bean Factory building slated for saving. Out of everything that SHOULD have been saved in Portland, this isn't one of them. Oh well.
 
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