Quote:
Originally Posted by officedweller
Those aspects aren't necessarily retsricted to tall buildings or caused by height.
Lowrises with massive blank walls can dissociate people from the street - i.e Main Post Office, back of the Law Courts.
Short buildings can block views too - it depends on siting. The CP Station blocks the water view north on Seymour Street.
Lowrises and midrises can create shadows too - I recall lots of streets in London and Paris being in shade due to construction right to the sidewalk.
As for "concentrating value", it would depend on your perspective - evenly distributing office space and residential space in lowrise buildings could produce more intense development across a wider area, destroying some of the "valuable" green aspects currently enjoyed by some areas. (i.e. people may want certain uses kept away from them.)
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sorry, i thought good urban design was automatically factored in, i didnt address it. **** of course a blank wall is going to kill urban behaviour.
when i talk about height, im not condoning 20 story buildings, let alone 40 stories, height in OUR CDB is simply the result of land economics, and people maximizing their yield at the expense of outlying areas. go to any european city, see the skyscrapers? no, i dont
i guess they have more head offices there, thats why they dont have high rises, some inverted correlation. hmm, land is more affordable, howd that happen?
spreading out development is finicky, im not talking about 0.5 far, or even 1, im talking about 70 upa/ 2.5 far; an amazing amount of green space would be left over if we did that.
i'd love to be farther away from the sea planes taking off, or the lafarge plant, or the container ships unloading, but that small 1/4 acre park down there in them streets is only enough grass for the dogs in one building to kill, oh and i forgot about the fact that the brochures never tell you about the reverberating sounds coming from all those lovely activities.
Quote:
Originally Posted by quobobo
Tall buildings are pretty much inevitable for downtown areas, and we already have plenty of them. If I feel "disconnected" from Shangri-La, I'm going to feel just as "disconnected" from, say, the TD Tower. It's not like 130m is somehow more psychologically manageable than 200m.
You block a couple people's views in exchange for providing living and working space for tens of thousands. Sunlight is a valid point, but I'll take a more vibrant downtown over slightly reduced sunlight any day. Besides, almost everywhere downtown is a kilometre or less from the waterfront.
Quick, we have to tell New York/Tokyo/Osaka this before they develop undesirable urban form and nobody wants to live there!
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eventually you reach a point where the additional height does not provide any additional benefits for the area, simply reducing views, sunlight, as in bye bye north shore mtns, im sure if we spread that density over south slope, wed have even better views had we had this hindsight.