urbanlife

The design looks horrible, but a great idea overall. This would be a great step forward for creating an urban district around the ballpark.

The size of the Hampton Roads metro, clustering all large office employers to just downtown Norfolk is a horrible idea. Hampton Roads is a lot like the LA metro, it takes up a lot of land, consists of several cities, and each have their own urban center and employment hubs. It makes plenty of sense for Chesapeake to have an urban center downtown and what DT is doing makes a lot of sense for the city.

The building looks like it would make a decent base of a tower, but that open courtyard along Plume is where the tower portion should be. I would have expected something at least 35 stories being built on this site. This building itself is much more in line with what I could see being built in the SPQ.

In that case, I would imagine they would either open the building up for leasing or sell it off to another owner. I don't think it would have a huge effect on office space in downtown to prevent the Gateway from being built, but I could see it being what stalls any new office buildings from being proposed.

That all depends, who was planning on moving into the Gateway Tower? There is a possibility that the Gateway Tower still gets built while NS Tower sits empty waiting for a new tenant or collection of tenants. Also who owns the NS Tower? There is a possibility that the NS Tower would see some renovating and leased off to smaller businesses from around the region looking to concolidate.

If it makes you feel any better, Portland is just now building its Convention Center Hotel after debating it for about 20 years.

I always loved these awful site projects when I was in architecture school in college. Taking an area that has a massive thing like a freeway interchange and designing architecture around it. This is a really solid proposal that they did, definitely something worth looking into for the city to further develop.

Just imagine where Norfolk would be today if new buildings were built mixed in with all the old buildings without having to tear down massive amounts of the urban core.

I would argue that all of Hampton Roads needs to look at this as a major issue. Expanding the airport and building a regional transit system should be a priority. The area needs to true metro government that deals with things like this.

I get that, but districts like this have to start somewhere and usually it is with the 4-5 story buildings to build up the bones for an urban district. Though it would be nice to see some form of retail space incorporated into the development because that is how you begin creating a street life in these types of places to help increase demand for bigger developments.

Something's better than nothing. Also this is pretty much the standard type of architecture for Norfolk these days.

The details do look good with these new buildings, if the area has this overall look, it will definitely work. My biggest issue with these buildings is that they should be 4-5 stories with the first floor being as much retail as possible. The more mixed use these buildings are, the more pedestrian activity they help create.

I so wish the whole metro would have gotten behind building a new airport out in Northern Suffolk because they could have had a much better airport by now that would have been able to keep up with other major metros. Though without it, that does make sense that a company like NS would be looking to leave. I know my biggest drawback to Norfolk International is how small it is, for me to ever fly back it would cost a small fortune, and honestly I would rather spend that much money flying to someplace better.

That would be horrible if NS moved out of Norfolk and a major loss for the city. It is unfortunate that this might be happening when it should be the other way around where they are building a new tower in downtown to grow their headquarters in Norfolk. Hopefully the city can come to an agreement to keep them in the city and help them expand within the city.

That is true, places like Virginia Beach don't have a history of urban developments and their zoning makes it so suburban developments are still the more ideal forms. Therefore getting a developer to take a risk on building urban towers and having banks willingly loan for those buildings is a hard pressed thing to get. Much easier to build office parks and strip malls in a city that is known for that and I don't see that changing much in the future even with the developments that have happened at the Town Center.