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Tall House site at 45 Ionia


Prankster

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This is probably a dumb question but it pertains to the design of City Hall. The whole area just seems disjoined with the life of downtown. Do you think the architects anticipated more use of public transportation when they designed the City Hall? It seems to me that the designers intended people to enter the building on the Plaza level. This is the lowest level the elevators go. In practicality though people drive their cars into the parking ramp and hop on the elevator there. This elevator only goes to the Plaza level. You then have to switch elevators to access the building. It seems like the access would be more geared towards the parking garage if this is how everyone would access the building.

Did he expect that people would take the bus and enter at the plaza level?

I'll answer this one before Prankster sticks his nose in and starts City Hall bashing again........ :P

The short answer is more then likely no. The architect for City Hall is a national firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill. The design stemmed from a time in civic design when it was thought that large public plaza was warrented for a project such as a city hall. I guess they assumed it would be used by a lot of people because most of them were quite large. However, they were very cold in nature and people mentally made a point to stay away from those types of places. We've learned through the years that the types of places that people like to congregate in are softer, have more landscape, have something interesting to look at, have nooks and places to sit, and on and on. People don't want to hang out in a barren wasteland of concrete.

Boston suffers from the same problem. They have a plaza in front of their city hall that makes ours look as pretty as the Grand Canyon.

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I have worked on other buildings like this where this was an intentional design feature. The Lobby transition offers a control point. Otherwise, you would have no control of who is using the elevators, direct from parking to the Mayor's office. This way, they have to pass a guard or at least gives the City the option for limited access.

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I don't like it. <_<

Why isn't it built to the street like everything else is on Ionia?

And all of those slanted balcony things or whatever they are make it look like the building is peeling.

And what's with the big blank column right in the middle?

It would be better built somewhere else, not on Ionia.

Anyways, thats my two cents

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There is a site plan on the GR DDA agenda for 03/08. Hard to tell from the small scale of the drawing, but it seems to take up the whole block that the bank of holland building is on. Also, they have it listed as 9 stories. Thought I had previously heard that it was 10?

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Not a fan of it. There is so much to be desired from what I'm seeing in that rendering. It looks like a suburban office building with balconies. There are some really cool contemporary designs going up in other cities that far surpass this. The facade is too flat and balconies coming out are somewhat awkward, and what the heck is up with the elevator shaft?

Here's an example of what it could look like. It's a condo going up in Chicago. Now this is nice:

1620rendering.jpg

Note how it embraces the street.

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