“When will this idea die?” asks Dominic Holden on SLOG in Towers in the F..ng Park . You owe it to yourself to check out the discussion on SLOG. 97 comments hours within posting.
In the comments thread of almost every Boom post I write, regardless of the development at hand, Will in Seattle remarks that what Seattle really needs are 100-story residential towers to provide affordable housing. He’s also suggested they should be surrounded by green space.
Sorry, Will, nothing personal, but towers surrounded by green space is one of the worst urban planning concepts ever conceived. Buildings 100 stories tall – parks or no parks – cost a ton of money. When subsidized to make low-income housing, towers have resulted in slums in the sky and urban decay on the ground—because people will choose to live in isolation when packed into dense artificial “communities.” Slog comment hero Fnarf, thankfully, has rebuked the notion again and again. I agree with Fnarf’s indictment over here, and I really love this one (even though it’s kinda mean) over here. The old idea, pushed by French architect Le Corbusier, is now widely discredited.
But that doesn’t mean developers have stopped pushing towers in the park. New York’s MTA chose Tishman Speyer to develop the West Side railyards. The buildings aren’t quite 100 stories, but here’s the towers-in-the-park proposal.
The NYT doesn’t mince words about the project today, in an article titled Profit and Public Good Clash in Grand Plans.
The full article is over here.
