NewTowner

What a beautiful mid-rise street! What I'd give for something like that in Nashville. Apparently the Signature is having to go through a few design changes to accomodate the Kimpton Hotel, as the developers were initially expecting a different hotel to go in (no Wonder). I don't know how much of the exterior will be affected, if at all...it might just amount to "space management" on the ground floor interior. But everything I am told about this project amounts to it being solidly "for real". No worries, skyscraper fans! I'm just glad it's not going in SoBro, and I think that the BBS fellows currently trying to shove a tower into the Schermerhorn at ramming speed should see the photograph above.

Gaushell, is there a rendering of the Google Earth

My pal on the design team is convinced the project will happen for damn sure.

Here, here! But in your list of crucial requirements for successful architecture, do not neglect to include "strength" as well as beauty and usefulness. Venustas, Utilitas, Firmitas...perhaps the only remaining requirement is Decorum, as we ask our buildings to speak in context, and to respect the public realm they are intended to serve.

OMG OMG OOMG EEK eek ek Dolores and I are betting on Peanut butter OMG OMG

300 3rd Tower could be better, but you are right--at least one side of the building will have some life. As for the rest of what you write, I couldn't agree more. What can be done to encourage better architecture?

I live in North Little Rock. I visited this street yesterday, just as I have done every day for the last month. This design is a failure, and the bottom half should have been undone and then redone. When I knocked on the parking garage, it was in reference to 300 3rd Tower. This building gets a lot more right than the "Residences," but it still should have either put the parking underground or taken its cue from Nashville's Viridian. I apologize, though--I was so frustrated with Little Rock's overall pattern of low expectations on the street level of new projects (Axciom, anyone?) that I failed to distinguish which of the many failures I was jabbing at in reference to the parking garage. The River Market has come a long way. I am optimistic about my hometowns of Little Rock and North Little Rock...but am disappointed by the big boo-boos currently getting slung around the city. We need a bloody design seminar in town, and quick!

I am personally stunned at the level of incompetence revealed by this "design." All of the blank-face portions of this building--appropriately highlighted in red in this image--are unbelievably awful. Who is behind this oderous project, and why did they not try to create a building with transparency and detail as befits an urban structure? I hope the "air-rights" permit never materializes, and that this whole thing has to be torn down. Somebody somewhere has unbelievably low expectations, and absolutely no regard for the public realm. I know this is an expansion project, not a totally new structure, but please--please, please, please, Little Rock: start getting the basics right. Parking garages and concrete slabs do not make appropriate ground levels. They create dead streets. People need doors and windows, holy crap.

Definitely true. That is this the 300 3rd tower's greatest failure.

There are also a lot of religious, politically conservative, family values-oriented New Urbanists. Bad ideas produced by the European Left are largely to blame for the suburbs in their current hyper-motorized and experimental forms. The suburban sprawl phenomenon is not the natural extrapolation of capitalism and freedom and abundance. It is a heavily-subsidized pseudo-socialist mass-machinist diversion from what common sense and the free market would have produced on their own. A culture in search of truth and beauty, which is by definition a culture with a tendency towards the religious, is not a culture which would naturally give itself over to the provisional, selfish, and obese living that so many automobile suburbs not only accomodate but rigidly enforce. The waste you speak of is real. It was intentional--Le Corbusier himself argued that the incredible amount of consumption spurred by suburban living would produce infinite jobs and help usher in his futuristic techo-fabulous vision of a Designed Utopia. What about resource depletion, you ask? What about the desolation of nature? Not to worry! These are neglible problems that technological progress will automatically solve as soon as the pressure picks up...obviously--according to this arrogant man and many of his Modernist colleagues, not to mention current proponents of business-as-usual via the Hypothetical Hydrogen Economy. "Urbanism" is not a creed. "The City of Tomorrow" was a creed, and it failed. We need to repair our places and make them worthy of affection and respect again.

The suburb you are living in is such an exception to the rule, it probably couldn't qualify as an automobile suburb in the most traditional sense. In the suburb I grew up in, the one kid who rode his bike to the store was eventually killed by a car (the poor fellow was rolling the dice with every journey), and everybody blamed the kid. It was a no-brainer: that arterial road is for cars, not people. Pedestrians routinely enjoyed the blessings of bottles and other trash, thrown at them from passing vehicles. My experience of the American automobile suburb is more typical than yours. The grocery shopping argument is weird. People who live in walkable communities don't stock up on months' worth of provisions at one time--they buy fresh bread and veggies and meat and eat it, and then they buy more on the way home from work in a couple of days. There are not tons of bags to carry. Old folks might have a little trouble, true--but people usually deliver, and in any case one can take a cart home most of the time. At least these older people aren't forced to live in a storage facility once they no longer qualify as motorists. Heavy bags are a small price to pay for continued civic existence. New Urbanists are not arguing that the automobile suburbs should be destroyed--there are no fascists or communists or other militant utopists among them, that I know of--but the implications of automobile-dependent life should be honestly confessed and considered. An alternative can, and should, exist in the centers of cities, and this is all that is really being asked for. The argument that malls and shopping centers are now our corporate-owned town centers is totally spot on. But the implications of this are terrifying, and only a fool would be happy to live in such a state (I wish I could say "no offense," but this would be dishonest). Citizenship and consumership are two very different things, and very different sets of rights and obligations are bestowed upon each social system's respective participants. Satisfaction with the erosion of the public realm and its replacement with Wal-Mart is tantamount to a happy surrender of the Republic for something a great deal less noble and humane. I would rather vote than spend, if I must choose between the two. Your religion and political beliefs are subject to both judgment and eviction on private property like malls and shopping centers. They are not in the American public square and on public sidewalks full of other people, where rights must be respected and no man or manager is King. You choose your Forum. In the suburbs, the public realm is mostly an ethereal medium for motoring through. In the City, it is real space--the common property of all, where men and women can gather and speak on their own terms provided they obey the common laws and respect one another. In many shopping malls, four or more men gathered together (more than a single car-load) are considered a gang-threat and are broken up or evicted. I prefer citizenship to consumership, and the New Urbanism provides for both.

The suburban development in Australia and California is really no different from the suburban development in Georgia or the South of France. The problem is not that land is bad or that houses are bad, or even that ownership of either is bad. The problem is that these places are built on the scale of machines, not people, and function best for machines, not people. Where once a pair of feet and some pants sufficed for participation in public life, now an internal combustion engine and half a ton of steel is required. Where once basic social skills and a familiarity with real places and faces enabled one to negotiate the business of living, now thousands of diposable dollars for automobile ownership/maintenance/fueling/insurance and a driver's license are the prerequisites for American/Australian/Global Suburban Life. Where once poultry and vegetables kept a family functioning, now imported and refined petroleum is as necessary as clean water. Suburban land development patterns, while they certainly provide gobs of oodles of space, have transformed expensive and energy-starving machines into prothestic limbs many people simply cannot live without. This is excess and futile dependency at its most terrifying and most dangerous. New Urbanism offers an alternative way of living, but you are correct in suggesting that it is not truly new--it is, however, much older than "Old Suburbanism." Its guiding principles are founded on realities which are as old as the human foot, eye, brain, and heart. People have longed for sustainable homes, worthy of both respect and affection, for much longer than automobile suburbs have made broken promises of machine-powered community and progress, and for much longer than the New Urbanists have fought to reclaim common architectural and urban sense from the garbage can. The very strength of the New Urbanism lies in its cry for a return to the human scale, which is neither new, nor negotiable.

No, wait...you didn't understand...we don't want to become like Atlanta. Atlanta has a lot of wonderful things about it, and many noble buildings (The Swan House comes to mind!), but Nashvillians want to avoid the ubiquitous sprawl and horrible automobile dependence that Atlanta has so fully embraced. That was the point of the post you quoted. The "statis" of Atlanta is a "statis" worth learning from, but not imitating.

Gaushell--what's the latest count on reserved Signature Tower units?

Ha ha, that's funny and so true ha ha ha... Atlanta's sprawl is suicidal, ha ha...well...that part isn't very funny... But Lawson's pointing out of the obvious is! Ha ha ha...

Word! Enjoy that Narnia.

We worked out why the music was there, my friend! My wife just thought it was funny, and I agreed. No offense on your video, man. It's pretty neat in a lot of ways. I like "ellegance" and romance...but whether or not the video and its accompanying classical ditty manage to convey that, in spite of the architecture, is what I was on about, I suppose...I probably would have chosen music that had some drums in it, as well as some strings--but I am not your firm, and I do not pretend to be. You are smack off the mark when you say that Baroque chamber music and classical architecture didn't exist at the same time--of course they did! The classical was slowly undone by picturesque eclecticism (the application of gargoyles on Notre Dame, for example) and pseudo-scientific historicism (the "Gothik" Revival), beginning in the late 18th century and coming to a cultural train wreck in the late 19th / early 20th century, when the insanity of World War I enabled a bunch of nihilistic socialists to package and sell "Modernism." The Ecole des Beaux Arts was alive and well, at least in America, well into the 20th century. That's classical architecture, yo, and it passes "classical music" in about the second lap. Word! But you are smack ON the mark, in my opinion, when you say that it would be impossible to erect a classical skyscraper--or at least it would be very, very, difficult. It would require some very creative massing and a structural vocabulary with no words to spare. The Human Scale, and all that. That's why, in the end, my wife and I thought it was funny that you chose classical music for the video. But I do not believe even for a second my post will, or even should, prompt you to change it. You are the professional, not I! I don't totally hate the Big SIG T. It has an articulate ground floor, and while the PM Art Deco "compromises to classicism" are a little half-ass at this juncture, they are still preferable by a long shot to the blank face of Modernism, which would have made your selection of classical music even more ridiculous. If Mies van der Rohe had done this joker, you would have been forced to pick something which was obsessed with its own "futuristic-ness," and rejected all that old classical gibberish like chords and bars. So there you have it - right or wrong from the fellow watching the video.

My wife noticed and verbally revealed how silly the classical music is on the Signature Tower website--after all, the building itself is about as classical as a cellphone-ringer rendition of Justin Timberlake's "Rock Your Body." I mean, I really can't bring myself to rain on everybody's parade with the Big Hooty-Hoo SIG T!! but I just can't take the musical dishonesty. You have to have at least one pilaster and no more than twelve floors before you are allowed to bust out the Bach. Let the hateful hate responses hatefully begin...Unleash, Skyscraper Playas!!

Dang, Smeagolsfree. That was a lot of work!! Thanks millions.

If Savannah did have a subforum, I would do a lot more posting and reading here. I live in downtown Savannah, and am on top of the stuff that is going on around here. May we puh-leeeezzzz start a Savannah subforum? And how do I post photos on Urban Planet?

Well, just using my pencil to count the stories: it looks like 60, plus the sizable crown/spire. The bottom portion, above which the building is nicely set back a bit, is about 13 stories. That's the part that counts once you are 500 yards or less from the building. I was previously told it would approach 70 stories, so I am just confused and concerned enough to slightly furrow my brow for about three seconds, and then my attention returns to the ground floor...where the real action is.

I have just seen the latest builds, and the Signature Tower is looking much better than it did before. The entire structure has been given some entasis in the simplest possible fashion, in that it draws in upon itself as it ascends, breaking up the sense of dead weight and giving the "lotus flower" crown an actual aesthetic purpose. It now visually functions much more like a column-and-capital, rather than an illustrious and shimmering aluminum-fencepost-and-Burger-King-sack. In a word or two: Art Deco. What I mean is, while the Signature Tower is still motion-streamlined and committed to machinism (a weakness), it also possesses the compromise with classicism that almost all good Art Deco possessed, in that it contains elements which are human-scaled, enough detail to satisfy the human eye/brain combo, and an organic lilt that gives the building a head and body. Like organic systems and all good buildings, it has a bottom, middle, and top...which rocks, and marks a HUGE improvement over the previous bottomless corporate rock-candy blob that Signature Tower used to be at street level. Some talented people have made some big adjustments, and it shows. It is very tall, which delivers some mixed feelings into my heart, but whatever. I won't be paying the cooling costs on this joker, or the Exterior Tolerability electric bill. Somebody posted something earlier to the effect that "skyscrapers are more energy efficient than midrises," but I don't think a sane person could even glance at these renderings and still assert that Bologne Hogwash with a straight face...but whatever. Whatever, and stuff. The Signature Tower might still need a new name, but at least the ground floor is now articulate and not as stupid as it used to be. There is actually a rather compelling interplay between horizontal and vertical elements, which are mostly impressive because they reveal a self-conscious internal attempt at mitigating the building's own overbearing height...and I think they will achieve some measure of success, particularly when it is raining and you are walking home from NewTowner's new downtown pub. It offers covering shelter to the passerby and resident. In other words, some good old-fashioned (GOF) common sense has been applied, and it is welcome. Welcome, I tell you.

A good friend who is in-the-know has told me that the Signature has for real been upped to 70 stories. I have mixed feelings about skyscrapers, but I thought this would be of great interest to many of my esteemed buddies here on Urban Planet. I can't say more, but will give you some filtered and probably biased information as I am further informed.

There used to be a HUGE electric streetcar system that serviced the entire city of Nashville. It was amazing. There are still vestiges of it throughout the city...submerged rail poking out of worn patches of asphalt, some downtown street patterns that were designed to accomodate trolley barns, etc. There used to be an old retired streetcar which remained as a testament to the system, over by Fort Negley somewheres. I believe the operators of the Cumberland Science Museum took a tractor and ground it to its demise, down a ravine, in order to make room for an expansion. Several locals begged to be allowed to take it and restore it, perhaps to give it to the Tennessee State Museum, but I guess someone else thought it would be more fun to drop it off a small cliff.

What exactly is the different, would you say, between a light rail line and Portland's transit system? I was under the impression that Portland's transit system WAS a light rail line. Maybe there is a distinction that I am failing to get...perhaps a speed difference or something. I would die for Nashville to have a light rail system connection all of its core neighborhoods. I wish the awesome one the city was blessed with back in the day had not been completely dismantled.