Quote:
Originally Posted by Drybrain
At Founders Square, the old buildings were just turned into wallpaper for the office tower. If they'd retained more of the original building massing, and use the entrances and exit as individual storefronts, I bet we'd see a much better result.
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Founders Square included the restoration of the buildings along Prince Street too. Some of them still have functional entrances and street-facing shops and they look great.
A big part of the problem is that people at large and the municipality in particular still don't quite have a good handle on what makes places like that successful, nor have they tied those requirements back to planning policy. If the new buildings were better than the old, there would be less need to preserve the old buildings (preserving some to maintain a connection to the past would still be a good idea, and lots of them remain great buildings of inherent value today).
Fundamentally I think the problem with most new development is that there is not enough interest at street level. The street frontages are too large so when you walk by the new buildings you do not see enough variety. On top of this there aren't pedestrian-scaled decorative features to add warmth and interest. Most new construction is basically utilitarian.
A bunch of people in Halifax bring up "human scale" and think it means that buildings need to be close in size to people, but that is just silly. Buildings can be much larger but they need to have
features that make sense on a human scale if they are to be appealing on more than an abstract level. You can find giant skyscrapers in New York (mostly old ones) that are like this; they are 80 storeys tall but still look approachable from the street. A lot of modern architects would have no idea how to replicate that.