Re: Waterside Place
Sigh. Really? I agree with your last paragraph, but as for the rest of it... 1)Hight limits are no excuse. 2) You're establishing false extremes when you talk about either "boring" or "starchitect." 3) I will not go out of my way to find you examples of good contemporary buildings of this type. I'll just tell you that they're out there and it's your problem that you can't find them. 4.) Are your expectations of contemporary architecture really this low, or are you somehow involved in this project?
First, I can promise you that I am not involved in this project, and that no, I don't hate all contemporary architecture. I was with those who liked the Cambridge library expansion, for instance, and I think the Congress St. Garage designs are beautiful, if only they would ever be built.
As to your numbered points:
1) Height limits are indeed no excuse to design an ugly low-rise building, but they are an excuse not to build tall. I think a lot of people on this board (which I have been following for many years) see a dichotomy between "tall" and "boring", at least when we're talking about a site this close to downtown. In the interest of full disclosure, I *have* worked for the FAA, spoken at length with the guy who declares these height limits, and found him to be a reasonable person with reasonable arguments, regardless of how much we may all be frustrated by them sometimes.
2) Again, there is some modernist architecture I like: (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okhta_Center). I don't care for most starchitects, and I think that the very nature of "experimental" is that some things succeed and some things fail. When you're designing the symbol of a neighborhood or city (or university, see Center, Stata) for a hundred years, you really should be confident that your design will work.
3) I can find plenty of examples of buildings that work, and I've given a couple here. I just think that it's trendy on this site to post pictures like that East Berlin shot on the prev. page and fill these posts with hyperbole. Obviously, people have different tastes, and I'm not trying to be holier-than-thou, but I think that ranting about how boring everything is is just as unproductive as the BRA killing projects which haven't paid the piper.