Oh boy, this is stirring up the dust near Hollywood and Vine:
Millenium Partners and Argent Ventures have released a website and the first big report (the draft environmental impact report) on Millenium Hollywood, their plan to put two big towers on either side of Vine Street by the Capitol Records Tower in Hollywood.
You can get more background here at LA Curbed and a flavour of the debate in the Comments.
What makes this interesting for us is that, by the seventh comment, ‘Vancouver’ becomes part of the dialogue, pro and con. (You have to click on the gray bars to get the anonymous comments):
- Hideous Vancouverish-looking towers! They seriously belong in Canaduh! Back to the drawing board,,,,
- @guest #7: Said it best, these towers belong in Vancouver. Anything is better than parking lots. However, this design is unimaginative.
- I love the fact that ‘Vancouver-style towers’ is being thrown around as some kind of criticism, when that city is filled with exceptionally high quality buildings. …
- @Chris Loos: Sure, Vancouver has lots of great buildings but none of them fit in at Hollywood and Vine. That’s the issue here.
And so it goes for hundreds more.
The truth is an extraordinary location with mountains and ocean can hide the fact that the buildings in downtown Vancouver are….well….remarkably all the same, with minimal exterior treatment. We have done a good job of addressing the street in most cases. In the air and above the ground plane-not so much.
@ Sandy “We have done a good job of addressing the street in most cases.” Oh indeed!
I don’t know how you can say that.
I will be a little more specific, Vancouver’s streets are utterly disastrous: dissonance prevails!
We ignore ground level for several reasons but mainly because of our concept of private property (i.e. the Closures of the 18th century).
Latin cities, fortunately, were inspired early by Phillip ll’s Laws of the Indies that prescribed, in addition to safe guards for the indigenous population, urban development.
Whereas in many great cities, Buenos Aires Avenida Florida, Oaxaca’s Mendocino Alcala and Mexico City’s Calle Francisco Madero most North American cities, in contrast, especially Vancouver, ignore the figure ground between buildings.
What ever happened to the party wall: that unifier of public urban spaces we spend millions and traipse thousands of miles to experience?
Vancouver’s towers, (despite the recent introduction of the proverbial architectural cliché, thu twist) are essentially formulaic, driven by cost and by-law, and as a result come off the drawing board, cookie cutter like, all the same: colourless, bearing no relationship to the street or one another.
For the business of architecture (world wide), long in the tooth, and saturated in cheap praise, there is no incentive to do otherwise.
Cut thru the self-serving hype . . . http://thetyee.ca/Books/2012/10/18/Selwyn-Pullan/
. . . read the comments and do the city a favour . . .
I can easily see the issue being the overshadowing of the iconic Capitol Records Building.