MIT spent a bundle on the block-sized new Gehry designed "Stata" building.
But, in my opinion, the new building’s primary architectural purpose is to imitate – with its posed visual variety and whimsical as-if-in-foundation-failure tilts - the East Cambridge, Massachusetts canal dock warehouse neighborhood which grew organically there before.
Sweet Daddy Tim’s, on Woodland in Cleveland, uses a similarly frivolous façade (looks like the back of a ‘59 Chevy – was the store built about then?) and Tim’s is hopping with convenience store action.
Now Peter Lewis says that University Circle would be improved by whore houses, and he has a valid point. UC has successfully sterilized itself – no Sweet Daddy Tim’s stores left there. Is the solution a Gehry retro fix a la MIT?
Funny, our US business society skills tap know how to make big, bigger, and biggest buildings (which we see Gehry goose up to look like they are a casual assemblage of smaller chronologically disparate and independently constructed buildings) . But making built-from-scratch environments which incorporate pedestrian scale small, smaller, and tiny structures – we Americans can’t do that.
We can barely do it with renovation of actual legacy buildings.
Where the expensive present trend is to make the new buildings look old – having drunken widow mullions and staggering floor lines, and not-so-vertical corners which appear to be on foundations which are sagging and ready to fall over – Wolstein should consider carefully before he demolishes the old strip clubs and bars and warehouses at the mouth of the Cuyahoga.
And the Port Authority should refuse to use eminent domain (which is presently frozen as a tool in the State), and the Plain Dealer's very obnoxious April 5th editorial should clean its nose. If Wolstein is such a clever and well heeled enterprenuer - what's wrong with his having to continue to negociate to purchase or work around holdouts without eminent domain exercised in what is supposedly our free market system?
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