Learning from Other Places

[NCMike1990]

 

11 minutes ago, jtmonk said:

I do agree that the glass on both 615 S College and One BofA look pretty good.  The thing about the UNCC building is that I like the light, translucent look that it has,  its a breath of fresh air from all the highly reflective glass in most of the buildings currently being built, it gives the City some much needed variety. 

I see your point about the glass. The blank white wall side doesn't look that great though. However, I still maintain that once other buildings are built around it, that it'll look better than sitting there by itself.

[CharlotteWkndBuzz]

29 minutes ago, jtmonk said:

I do agree that the glass on both 615 S College and One BofA look pretty good.  The thing about the UNCC building is that I like the light, translucent look that it has,  its a breath of fresh air from all the highly reflective glass in most of the buildings currently being built, it gives the City some much needed variety. 

Yeah, there aren't that many buildings with that light/translucent look.  One that came to mind is the Courtside Condos.  

[KJHburg]

North Hills Midtown Raleigh continues to expand starting soon a 33 story tower with apartments and hotel and another office building.  North Hills is the densest suburban development by far in NC and the most dense project south of Tysons Corner VA in Fairfax County outside of DC or north of the Perimeter Center area of Atlanta.  https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article215561800.html   

Here is a report on the project as a whole if you not seen it.  http://www.kanerealtycorp.com/north-hills-2018-mid-year-update/   read the midyear report of this Kane development here.   It is tremendously successful. 

[videtur quam contuor]

Numerous murals in Charlotte have been posted to the site over time. This is a site of a French muralist of trompe l'oeil style murals by the name of Patrick Commecy. This is a tradition in modern France to enliven open spaces of older parts of the cities by informing about the past, giving activity to plazas and spaces and providing a delight to the eye and the mind.He is not the only person doing these but he is perhaps the most well known.

The 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in Cannes is my favorite.

http://www.a-fresco.com/

There are other examples online at other web sites.

[tozmervo]

6 hours ago, tarhoosier said:

Numerous murals in Charlotte have been posted to the site over time. This is a site of a French muralist of trompe l'oeil style murals by the name of Patrick Commecy. This is a tradition in modern France to enliven open spaces of older parts of the cities by informing about the past, giving activity to plazas and spaces and providing a delight to the eye and the mind.He is not the only person doing these but he is perhaps the most well known.

The 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in Cannes is my favorite.

http://www.a-fresco.com/

There are other examples online at other web sites.

You just jogged my memory about one of the really fun trompe l'oeil murals I saw in Lyon a few years back. So much life and so many hidden stories in all of the scenes as you look across it. 

https://www.google.com/maps/@45.768291,4.8278815,3a,56.7y,149.88h,97.23t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sYRcMW7tQdTCLl5w7bsCo3Q!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

Edited July 30, 2018 by tozmervo
UP preview of google maps link not quite working

[NCMike1990]

On 7/27/2018 at 8:36 PM, KJHburg said:

North Hills Midtown Raleigh continues to expand starting soon a 33 story tower with apartments and hotel and another office building.  North Hills is the densest suburban development by far in NC and the most dense project south of Tysons Corner VA in Fairfax County outside of DC or north of the Perimeter Center area of Atlanta.  https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article215561800.html   

Here is a report on the project as a whole if you not seen it.  http://www.kanerealtycorp.com/north-hills-2018-mid-year-update/   read the midyear report of this Kane development here.   It is tremendously successful. 

I hope Charlotte will someday get a 30+ story tower outside of the CBD.

[Cadi40]

We will one day. As prices rise in Uptown, Developers will realize the financial benefits of building their towers in neighborhoods outside of the city like Southend, Midtown, Elizabeth, Etc. Neighborhoods like Southpark, Ballantyne, and University City will also get taller office buildings if development ordinances allow.

[KJHburg]

From H-town, new highrise in Houston will have 35,000 sq ft food hall.   This should be done at some new Charlotte tower.  Offers a variety of food at reasonable prices.  

https://www.bizjournals.com/houston/news/2018/08/06/capitol-tower-developer-reveals-food-hall-plans.html?ana=e_ae_set1&s=article_du&ed=2018-08-06&u=oAaDx%2B74FoP4qOJ%2By4AU6dhJPpc&t=1533587575&j=83115951

and guess who is anchoring this new Houston tower?   None other than our Charlotte based Bank of America    hmmm LIncoln Harris could be a good idea.

[KJHburg]

What can Savannah teach Charlotte about urban development?  Couple things beyond the obvious historical preservation but also adaptive reuse projects and design standards.  Check out the Plant Riverside a Kessler hotel project of 400+ rooms in an old power plant down by the river and with new construction matching it to blend it greatly. 

http://www.plantriverside.com/#home    Brick new almost complete building is a new Starwood hotel across from Plant Riverside.   These are both great projects which will anchor the western end of River St.    You will be able to rent a room in the old power plant building with its smokestacks.  Plus 3 rooftop bars are apart of this project.  

The design of that all brick hotel looks great and fits into the city and we could use more brick here to contrast with our glass and stucco hotels. 

[KJHburg]

This is more of seeing of what is happening in other cities.  DEconversions.   Converting condos back to apartments.  Happening a good bit in Chicago now. Obviously we have had several buildings here built as condos but quickly converted to rentals the Vue, the Catalyst before too many buyers had purchased.   http://www.costar.com/News/Article/Chicagos-Largest-Condo-Deconversion-Signals-Post-Recession-Push-To-Rent/203712

[SgtCampsalot]

2 hours ago, KJHburg said:

This is more of seeing of what is happening in other cities.  DEconversions.   Converting condos back to apartments.  Happening a good bit in Chicago now. Obviously we have had several buildings here built as condos but quickly converted to rentals the Vue, the Catalyst before too many buyers had purchased.   http://www.costar.com/News/Article/Chicagos-Largest-Condo-Deconversion-Signals-Post-Recession-Push-To-Rent/203712

Fascinating. I wonder how many years or decades until some of our choice apartments are converted to condos.

[asthasr]

I saw this rebuild on ArchDaily and couldn't help but compare it to some of the uninspired/ugly EIFS things we get. It's hard for me to imagine how this type of structural concrete and wood building could be any more expensive to build, and yet it's far more interesting looking. I'd love to have a building or two in Charlotte in this style.

Edit: And another example, this one in Japan.

(Although I'll note Tokyo has worse electrical wires than Charlotte!)

Edited August 18, 2018 by asthasr

[videtur quam contuor]

I know nothing about earthquake mitigation design issues in Japan but my guess is that above ground is less likely to be affected by movement and shear than below ground conduits.

[asthasr]

On 8/18/2018 at 6:16 PM, tarhoosier said:

I know nothing about earthquake mitigation design issues in Japan but my guess is that above ground is less likely to be affected by movement and shear than below ground conduits.

You'd think, but it also seems like it'd raise the risk of downed power lines after an earthquake. It seems like they're trying to bury them for the 2020 Olympics.

[SgtCampsalot]

On 8/18/2018 at 3:29 PM, asthasr said:

I saw this rebuild on ArchDaily and couldn't help but compare it to some of the uninspired/ugly EIFS things we get. It's hard for me to imagine how this type of structural concrete and wood building could be any more expensive to build, and yet it's far more interesting looking. I'd love to have a building or two in Charlotte

Edit: And another example, this one in Japan

(Although I'll note Tokyo has worse electrical wires than Charlotte!)

On 8/18/2018 at 6:16 PM, tarhoosier said:

I know nothing about earthquake mitigation design issues in Japan but my guess is that above ground is less likely to be affected by movement and shear than below ground conduits.

 

3 hours ago, asthasr said:

You'd think, but it also seems like it'd raise the risk of downed power lines after an earthquake. It seems like they're trying to bury them for the 2020 Olympics.

Oof, Japan has an urban density and form that may never happen in the US, at least outside small pockets of cities and maybe not for hundreds of years. Their alleys and mixed-use ped-oriented skinny-footprint buildings are truly a marvel.

Also, just look at this completely random zoomed-in section of a random Japanese city. Drool....

 

Edited August 20, 2018 by SgtCampsalot

[asthasr]

14 minutes ago, SgtCampsalot said:

Oof, Japan has an urban density and form that may never happen in the US, at least outside small pockets of cities and maybe not for hundreds of years. Their alleys and mixed-use ped-oriented skinny-footprint buildings are truly a marvel.

 

Yep. It's common throughout Asia, too. Even the bits of Chinese cities that get knocked down and rebuilt as large concrete blobs would be astounding paragons of urban form if you excised them and put them in the middle of Charlotte. (For example.)

[KJHburg]

Reason we need a new tallest to surpass this Turkish Tulip proposed in Miami

http://www.costar.com/News/Article/Tulip-Shaped-Tower-Planned-for-Miami-Skyline/203927

[asthasr]

This is an excellent talk by one of Vancouver's planners, Brent Toderian:

 

[DMann]

Well said!!!  Vancouver is my favorite city.  I get there as often as possible and would move there in a heartbeat.   When I first started to go there I was encouraged by the lack of freeways in the central business district, and have marveled at its continued growth and charm ever since.

[asthasr]

It's been a while since I did something like this, so I decided to take a few minutes this morning and compare "here" to "there." The other day I'd had the thought that these big box stores that pretty much make up the "retail landscape" take up a lot of room... so I thought I'd check the space requirements and see what that "buys" you elsewhere. I chose Costco, because that's where I was when I had the thought. I'm not going to count the parking area, because that's just unfair.

Costco is roughly 150m by 100m. (That's 1.5 hectares.) Let's compare this to a couple of different international cities: two in Asia, one in North America, and one in Europe.

First, let's look at Seoul. Seoul is an Alpha world city, characterized by a steadily redeveloping downtown and suburban outer ring characterized by Asian-style tower development. I'm not interested in the classic neighborhoods of Seoul, which do still survive, because there's simply no way that those will be built here in the US. They're not a viable alternative. Instead, let's look at what passes for "suburbia" in many large Asian cities...

This is a new(-ish) "skyscraper suburb" in the Songpa district of seoul. It looks alien from above, but if we look at the street level, many of the towers actually engage the street directly. It's certainly not a beautiful neighborhood, and these buildings aren't particularly well-executed, but (as I've said before in other comparisons), if you lifted this street directly and put it into Charlotte, it'd immediately be one of Charlotte's best streets.

 

Next, let's look at North America. A city that's considered a paragon of modern urbanism, Vancouver! I chose this because of the Brent Toderian video I linked above. It's a pretty good mid-rise development with The Home Depot(!) as one of its primary tenants, called "the Rise." It's actually quite a bit smaller than the Costco building footprint: about 110m by 80m.

Like a lot of Vancouver, I actually think this is a pretty "Asian" looking building. It's a residential-over-retail design, with Home Depot and other retailers occupying the bottom two floors and multifamily on the top three. It's kind of an island--the rest of the streetscape is pretty dismal--but the massing is nice and the development itself is excellent.

Next up is Amsterdam. I chose a relatively undistinguished street in Amsterdam-West.

In street view, you can see that the footprint of Costco constitutes a well-defined "street as room" type of space, with ground floor retail and the rather typical three floors of residential above.

Last, I've deliberately chosen a "weird" city. Seoul, Vancouver, and Amsterdam are well known internationally, but the next city is a sprawling Chinese mess: Ningbo.

This is an in-town block of Ningbo a few blocks from their river, a couple of blocks off the blue line of their metro. (They currently have two lines with 75km of track, and another 75 km planned.) Street view isn't available on Google, but it is on Baidu. This block includes the Portman Plaza hotel, which contains various restaurants, banks, and other services, and across from that about 120m of typical Asian mixed-use: a floor of retail with six floors of residential above. Ningbo is not a particularly well-known or scenic city, but this block includes street trees and docked rental bicycles along with the universal plague of dockless bicycles. 

"So what's your point?" Well, I continually think about how a city basically has two components: land and people. It strikes me that big box retail, which makes up so much of our city (and others around the country), basically wastes half of that equation. The building for Costco alone is 150m x 100m. These comparison projects, which I've chosen mainly because they're undistinguished and not particularly notable, illustrate what we could be doing instead. Are they tourist destinations? No, they're not -- but neither is Costco, and you can see what other places are doing with comparable pieces of land. Just imagine the difference in amenities and services that can be offered when, instead of giving up large percentages of land to single corporations (ignoring the issue of tax breaks!), hundreds of taxpayers and dozens of businesses can occupy the same space. Why have I chosen these places in particular as comparisons? Well, that's just it: this was pretty much at random. I picked places that aren't particularly well known or historic; that get a lot of everyday use by everyday people; that aren't tourist destinations; and that (with the exception of the Amsterdam street) have a similar "lack of history" to Charlotte. I hope that this helps make the point that these types of places are achievable and can make up much more of the "mix" in Charlotte than they currently do.

Edited September 25, 2018 by asthasr

[QCxpat]

2 hours ago, asthasr said:

"So what's your point?" Well, I continually think about how a city basically has two components: land and people. It strikes me that big box retail, which makes up so much of our city (and others around the country), basically wastes half of that equation. The building for Costco alone is 150m x 100m. These comparison projects, which I've chosen mainly because they're undistinguished and not particularly notable, illustrate what we could be doing instead. Are they tourist destinations? No, they're not -- but neither is Costco, and you can see what other places are doing with comparable pieces of land. Just imagine the difference in amenities and services that can be offered when, instead of giving up large percentages of land to single corporations (ignoring the issue of tax breaks!), hundreds of taxpayers and dozens of businesses can occupy the same space. Why have I chosen these places in particular as comparisons? Well, that's just it: this was pretty much at random. I picked places that aren't particularly well known or historic; that get a lot of everyday use by everyday people; that aren't tourist destinations; and that (with the exception of the Amsterdam street) have a similar "lack of history" to Charlotte. I hope that this helps make the point that these types of places are achievable and can make up much more of the "mix" in Charlotte than they currently do.  (emphasis added)

@asthasr  I think you make an important point, and have illustrated it very well, concerning the advantages of multi-story and multi-purpose developments in Ningbo, Amsterdam, Vancouver, and Seoul. 

The most obvious difference between Charlotte and the 4 international cities is that Charlotte has a low population density while the other cities have much higher densities.  Charlotte, which sprawls over 305.4 sq. mi. has a density of approx. 2,813/sq. mi.  By comparison, Amsterdam has a density of approx. 13,300/sq. mi or 4.7 times as dense as Charlotte.  Vancouver has a density of approx. 14,226/sq. mi or 5.1 times as dense as Charlotte.  Seoul has a density of approx. 42,000/sq. mi or 14.9 times as dense as Charlotte.  Because Ningbo, China, is a large administrative district (prefecture) covering both urban and rural areas, the published density figures are not strictly comparable to Charlotte and the other cities, proper.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, out of the 765 American cities with populations of 50,000+ as of 07/01/2017, Charlotte had the 7th largest numeric pop. increase from 07/01/2016 to 07/01/2017.   Charlotte's pop. increased by 15,551 residents and was estimated by the Census Bureau to have reached 859,035 as of 07/01/2017.   As Charlotte continues her rapid growth, and experiences a corresponding increase in density, the chances are we'll start to see more multi-story and multi-purpose developments, such as Novel Stonewall Station (with a mix of residential apartments, retail - Whole Foods, and hotels). 

Photo by UP's Special Correspondent @KJHburg  posted on 09/12/2018 in the Crescent Stonewall Station thread at p. 55.

[asthasr]

30 minutes ago, QCxpat said:

The most obvious difference between Charlotte and the 4 international cities is that Charlotte has a low population density while the other cities have much higher densities. 

Oh, agreed--but it's a chicken and egg problem. You get increased density by not building single-use cubes surrounded by acres and acres of parking. As our population increases, I do expect that we'll get more high density development Uptown, but right now it's kind of an island. It will need to be more comprehensive and common throughout the urban fabric if living without a car in Charlotte is ever going to be anything more than a conceit.

[KJHburg]

I have said it before but this little resort town of 40,000 in the South Carolina lowcountry can teach big ole Charlotte a thing or two.  THE most bike friendly town in the southeast bar none.

Learn more here https://www.hiltonheadisland.org/see-do/biking/biking-maps

Tree protection is legendary on HHI.  See attached photos of our Walmart and its parking lot.  Signage is all wooden,  no neon allowed.  (had to get a shake at Cook Out because of the summer temperatures this week) 

Flood control projects looks like this park Jarvis Creek Park which is now is one of the biggest homes of alligators on the island outside of Palmetto Dunes canal system. 

 

[asthasr]

This is a great video about Mississauga, Ontario, that captures some of the problems of trying to densify without paying attention to the urban fabric: 

 

[DMann]

Well stated!