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Originally Posted by View2gowanus
It's good to see Asheville building up rather than yet another gated golf community ruining the mountains (I grew up there). But it's sad to see them propose something so historically mundane. I guess I'm not surprised, modernity has never been embraced by Asheville, despite its over-hyped 'new age' community. These towers look awful together and make no sense.
I'd be interested in what the populace (via the Citizen Times, etc.) has to say. (?)
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Seeing as how local architects, as well as a few national names such as I.M. Pei, have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are completely and irrevocably incompetent at delivering a modern design that's pleasing or attractive in Asheville, can you blame Ashevillians for wanting buildings that are more in line with what's already here? And that "new age" community you referred to is pretty much a reaction to the corrosive influences of modernism anyway though, unless the hippies and crystal worshipers and witches in Brooklyn live in boxy glass towers or something. Around here's we're used to them growing organic veggies back behind old 1920's-era bungalows and totally rejecting the rat race.
How is this historically mundane, might I also ask, when what the developer is doing is building a structure that was already planned? All he's doing is adding about six floors to the tower planned originally for the top of the Grove Arcade. Is it "mundane" to take old, good plans and put them to work? Would it be "mundane" to also take Douglas Ellington's Art Deco high-rise courthouse plans, or any of the other Asheville tower plans that were killed by the Depression, and build them too?
And also, how on earth did you spend any time here and not notice how no two buildings downtown match each other? All the best buildings are juxtaposed against other wildly clashing styles. Art Deco City Hall and neoclassical Buncombe County Courthouse. Spanish baroque Basilica of St. Lawrence and brutalist Asheville Civic Center (although the Civic Center is not one of the best buildings by any stretch of the imagination). Romanesque Drhumor Building next to the Art Deco S&W Cafeteria Building, across the street from the brutalist Wachovia Bank. Hell, look at the Grove Arcade itself. It's Italianate/neo-gothic and to the north there's the neo-Georgian Battery Park Hotel. To the east there's the Art Deco Pearlman's Furniture building. To the west there's the art-moderne Asheville Citizen-Times building and to the south there's a modern parking deck and a couple of arte-nouveau commercial buildings.
If the two buildings proposed as part of this plan did match at all, then they'd be boring and not at all in keeping with the city's character.
What exactly would you propose for Asheville? Some lumpy Bilbao-esque tower?
Oh yeah... and as for what the locals are saying, for one you have your usual selection of whiny transplants complaining that they moved here for "quaint, small-town charm" (when Asheville is not quaint and does not have small-town charm, and doesn't want to) while blissfully ignoring the fact that by moving here, they helped make the city less small. Then you have your social activists who hate the rich and see this as another invasion of the gentry, and who will probably vandalize the construction site the way they've done with most every other large-scale project nearby over the past decade. Perhaps not ironically, in that vein, this building would replace the Kostas Menswear building, which also used to house a furrier where a couple of years ago someone impaled a raccoon on a pole and jammed it through the door handles.
Everyone else, however, seems to be thrilled about this proposal.
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