^^^ Yeah, that's exactly how not to do a facadetomy. I don't think I can find a single angle of Legacy where you can tell the facades are pasted onto the new building. Let's not forget our own "pasted on" facadectomy:
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Though I am actually a fan of 10 S LaSalle. I don't like the pasted on look, but this is really the only example this egregious in the city and the tower portion is actually quite interesting. It's nice to have a good example of every style, even the less savory ones. Given the age in which this tower was built, it's lucky they even tried to preserve anything.
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Originally Posted by untitledreality
Historic preservation is not simply about what we see. It is as much about how we interact with the fabric of the city, and the varying scales of which that takes place, as anything. The Heritage gutted and combined five prewar buildings taking up three quarters of a city block frontage, Legacy took three buildings making up half a block. Those smaller, cheaper spaces were just as beneficial to the human scale of Wabash as the hand laid facades. Now they are just stage sets masking big box retailers and parking garages.
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While I don't totally disagree, especially about the Heritage which suffers from high vacancy, maybe what you are observing is a shift in how we use our built environment, not a violation of some sort of hard and fast rule of urban planning. Think about it, many of the smaller buildings along this stretch of Wabash have high vacancy to begin with. That's probably because there isn't all that much demand for rickety 4th floor 2,500 SF Class D office spaces. Today's tenants generally want larger spaces with modern interiors and amenities such as elevators. Sure someone would take the old small spaces, but the use would be far below "highest and best". Maybe that's a good thing and you have artists setting up shop adding a lot of intangible value, but maybe it's not a great thing and you have a PC repair shop that hasn't been cleaned out since 1998 which is adding really no value at all. Of course the irony is that old school Chicago cultural institutions like the University Club of Chicago and School of the Art Institute came to occupy the "big box" spaces you decry in the Legacy.
Buildings must be periodically updated and the size of building gutted by Legacy and Heritage was a particularly difficult range to re-purpose. Giant condo towers are the new highest and best use in the area and I think they relatively successfully integrate without disrupting much of the street level feel. So while I'd love to have Chicago be a museum where nothing old is ever destroyed, the trade off with the Legacy facadectomy in particular falls squarely in the "win" column in my mind.
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