Quote:
Originally Posted by Nowhereman1280
Which would you rather have as a pedestrian the Federal building's featurless stone walls or this:
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I'd rather have both. I don't understand why they demolished all those buildings, including the ones the previous 2 posters mentioned, as well as all the neoclassical buildings from the World Columbian Exposition, and that's just Chicago. It's not like Chicago was running out of space. Why couldn't they have kept those in a sort of a historic core and constructed all the new skyscrapers adjacent to them or in between. In NYC for instance, after the historic preservation laws went into effect, you have old neoclassical short buildings in midtown and downtown mixed in with new skyscrapers and it doesn't look bad at all. I'm sure they could have found a use for the old federal building, someone would have wanted it for sure. And I don't think it's all that pedestrian unfriendly, certainly less so than some newer buildings in Chicago where there's literally nothing but a wall there for pedestrians to see and a tall one too followed but boring windows higher up. At least this building had ornamentation on a more human scale and the entrances were beautiful as well, not to mention the magnificent rotunda. They actually spent $2 million on ornamentation both inside and out in 1898-1905 when the building was constructed - that's over 50 million in 2009 dollars.