Spatula

It'll never happen but I'd like to see something tall in that spot.

http://goodnightraleigh.com/2010/07/a-forgotten-treasure-the-raleigh-water-garden/ This may be the Raleigh Water Garden that you are thinking of. That sign at the front was a landmark for many years on Glenwood. It was demolished for new developments several years ago. Quite a loss, I think. Tiny nooks and crannies like this are what give a city character.

http://fox13now.com/2017/03/16/videos-show-massive-fire-in-downtown-raleigh/ Some videos of the fire at its peak. Flames topped the height of the 15 floor Quorum Center nearby. LIVE FEED: http://heavy.com/news/2017/03/raleigh-fire-live-stream-downtown-watch-news-coverage-update-death-toll-cause/ Looks like it's calming down, and they've wrangled it under control now. It spread to some neighboring structures though.

Maybe they can merge our threads? We must've been just a few seconds apart.

If it bans them I'm cool with it. I've always considered it a matter of time until one of them went off. While it is possible to construct relatively safe wood buildings (even wood skyscrapers), the ones going up are nothing like that.

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article139056083.html

Despite being yet another 20 floor building with similar architectural themes to 301, I quite like this one. The dimensions are much better than 301 Hillsborough and it'll block the view of the Clarion from the west, which I consider a major bonus.

I can say that I don't shop much. If we got an IKEA... they would get my money on opening day.

If that hotel section were on top of the office, it would look much better. But no, let's make everything 20 floors! That's the sacred height!

I will say, kudos to Raleigh for voting to pay its civic employees a wage you can actually survive on. They don't get everything wrong. Hopefully if HB2 gets repealed they can push to raise wages for everyone in the city. Raleigh has always been held back by being in North Carolina, to some extent.

A real gut-punch would be if the N&O site became all 20-story buildings as a result of this. Prepare yourself emotionally for that very real possibility.

From time to time, Raleigh's city government has taken a stand and done something audacious. They do generally play it safe though. It's a tricky minefield because left/right politics don't always predict how a city's voters will react to urban policy. When Chapel Hill tried to pass a transit tax several years ago, I remember hearing all manners of arguments for and against from liberals, socialists, conservatives, libertarians... "We should have the transit tax because the rail system is a good idea". "I support mass transit but oppose the transit tax because I hate sales taxes. Why can't we ever have progressive taxes for this stuff, why does it always fall on the poor? If it were added to income taxes I'd like it." "Trains are a boondoggle. It's a waste of money". "Trains are a boondoggle, but we need the other transit improvements to help grow business and I doubt they'll really build the trains so I support the tax". Two left leaning and right leaning views that I've heard. You can tell this was Chapel Hill because the 2nd one was by far the most common anti-transit-tax opinion I encountered.

We need a coordinated effort to get candidates on the city council who aren't such NIMBYs. Seems like it's a bigger problem with MacFarlane's council than it was for Meeker's.

It's easy to tear something down, it's harder to make a positive claim. But I've attached this crudely drawn MS Paint showing what I think the main problem is, and a simple way to fix it that would cost NOTHING to the developer. The saddle should try to look like a 3rd building, with a constrasting architectural style compared to the other two. This alleviates the image of the whole block as a monolith and makes it look like a city block with 3 different buildings on it. I'd change some other things too, if I had god powers though. The upper 1-2 floors should have a different color theme from the rest of the building, to give it golden ratio appeal. We see this in Progress 1 and the Skyhouse, where the upper floors have a distinctive architectural flourish compared to the rest, and it goes a long way towards giving the buildings character.

It looks like ass. You guys are kidding yourselves. If the two buildings attempted to form their own architectural ideas, and if the 'saddle' in between tried to look more like an independent 3rd building, it could be acceptable. As it is currently it would be a borg cube sitting in downtown. It's a disorganized mess. Reminds me of some of the later designs of the Reynolds Tower that would've sat on the block, which people also said looked ugly, except this is even uglier since it takes up the whole block. The Reynolds Tower at least would've had decent vertical proportions. Bear in mind the western building will be more visible for people entering downtown from Glenwood and Hillsborough, and it's the architecturally weaker of the two.