It's about height. Regs only allow so much total square footage per the size of the lot (plus whatever air rights are purchased). The more square footage "wasted" on maintaining the street wall means less square footage up high -- where the highest priced units are.
This is where zoning regs which mandate minimum street wall in accordance with existing neighborhood conditions are needed.
Sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb... and we´ll have a left and a right.
The UWS is about BRICK ....there´s a visual uniformity similair to the historic areas of the great cities of Europe....if you´re going to break that uniformity it better be good.
A classy piece of ultra-modern architecture done by a Richard Meier would´ve worked here ....but this is junk....tall glittery junk.
Sophistication:
http://www.emporis.com/en/il/im/?id=197296
Last edited by Fabrizio; August 3rd, 2006 at 04:28 AM.
Ariel West taken on 9/20/2006.
It is strange how the zoning laws that are supposed to protect our streets often are the culprit in destroying them. Decent building, just wrong everything else.
If only it could have risen 6 measly floors at the streetwall this all could have been fixed.
Last edited by kurokevin; September 22nd, 2006 at 05:44 PM.
I recently went to a zoning committee meeting at Community Board 2 (in regard to the hotels going up at 66 Charlton & 54 Watts -- both of which will sit back from the existing street walls on their streets) and we discussed Zoning Regs in regards to street walls.
It turns out that NYC has no Zoning Regulations requiring a minimum street wall height (only maximums in various districts). In fact, due to FAR, if a builder DOESN'T honor the existing streetwall and pushes the bulk of the building back from the street then more height is allowed (in most cases).
All at CB2 agreed that, in most cases, maintaining street walls would be a great thing -- and changing the Zoning Regs would be long and involved.
Don't know that there is the support -- either within City Planning or at a grass roots level -- to fight that fight.
Any thoughts?????
Most of the country's zoning enshrines yesterday's ideology as today's mandate and tomorrow's obstruction of progress. It took decades to write modernism's penchants into the law, and it'll take decades to get them out.Originally Posted by lofter1
Not long ago I designed a town house development that flew in the face of suburban zoning and various well-intentioned but mistaken sociological "studies" by planners. The studies' conclusions had been adopted by the city as legal guidelines for the district where I designed the project, and these guidelines remained in place despite the fact that the welfare-case subjects of the studies had moved on decades ago. Only the policy remained, addressing no-one.
Trying to be progressive and dedicated to smart growth, the city desperately wanted the non-conforming townhouse project, but the professional staff had to recommend rejection; their job is to enforce the law as written. Eventually the City Council had to overrule their own planners, declaring: "We have to make it easier to get a project like this through." And indeed they will --in a few more years-- with a new set of strictures that will enshrine today's wisdom and serve as an obstacle to tomorrow's progress, as conditions and tastes change in unpredictable ways.
In most cases I'd favor skipping the zoning entirely --leaving the decision to the City Council, which has the power anyway to overrule the zoning. The time, effort and money put into going through the zoning rigamarole is a waste.
And the decision-making quality that emerges from the intelligence of eleven bright, well-intentioned folks far exceeds the capabilities of laws written decades ago without any idea of actual conditions in the place and time they govern. It isn't even theoretically possible to postulate a scenario in which blind application of numerical formulas yields a better outcome than insight and intelligence applied to a known condition.
Zoning is more or less bunk.
That ^^^ unfortunately leaves NYC with Mr. Chang & Mr. Kaufman and their assorted POS.
NYC will survive them ... but really would be better off them -- or their McSams.
Not sure what you're saying, but these guys operate within the zoning.
That's what I said -- the existing zoning allows them to put up the POS that we're seeing all over town ...
More a matter of bad taste than anything else.
Taste is like culture: by one definition everyone has it, by another it's a possession of the few.
Another ugly, blank sidewall - another failure at producing good, modern architecture.
The arguments about zoning are interesting, and make sense: few, if any, bureaucratic processes/regulations seem to apply well these days. They're all hopelessly outdated, and in many cases, are such obstacles that they prevent progress to occur; instead of moving forward, we're constantly moving backward, or spinning in circles to address paperwork. It's a wonder anything gets done in a somewhat timely fashion these days; there must be a venerable army of people whose job it is to pore through all the legal documents and make some sense of them.
If anyone's ever read or seen The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, I think you'd agree that we're really starting to resemble the Vogons.
From Wikipedia:
Far back in prehistory, when the first primeval Vogons crawled out of the sea, the forces of evolution were so disgusted with them that they never allowed them to evolve again. Through sheer obstinacy, though, the Vogons survived, wrecked the planet, and emigrated en masse to the Megabrantis cluster, where they form most of the Galactic bureaucracy, most notably in the famous Vogon Constructor Fleets (which allows them a socially-acceptable way to spend their time demolishing things).
Some must be hard at work writing zoning codes.
And designing hotels and apartment buildings in NYC ...
From Curbed:
Uploaded on September 24, 2006 by jschumacher
Broadway has the potential boulevard order of West End Avenue. I would have been happy to see these as streetwall buildings like the ones in the foreground; To accomplish that, however, you need to resort to airshafts. Those aren't too popular these days.
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