Demolition on 18th Street
This is how the four doomed 18th Street townhouses looked on Sunday morning, a day after Hal Wheeler began demolishing them to build a 33-story (397-foot-tall) condo tower designed by Robert A.M. Stern. Even though I've known this was coming, it's still a shock to see the old gents fall.But it appears at this moment that the demolition is LEGAL, since Common Pleas Court Judge Matthew A. Carrafiello issued a ruling late last year supporting the developer. Although the project's opponents - Gersil Kay and Stuart Rosenfeld of Save Our Square - have appealed in Commonwealth Court, they never obtained a stay to prevent the demolition. Therefore, the developer was legally entitled to seek a demo permit.
I've always felt conflicted about this project. While Stern is a first-class hack architect, I don't buy the opponents' claims that his tower is too tall for the square. The tower is surrounded by tall buildings. Sure it's painful to loose buildings with real texture, like the four on 18th Street, but Stern's tower will be set back 15 feet along 18th Street and then replaced by new four-story structures. That means the scale of the quirky street will remain the same. And let's not forget that this project actually works for the cause of preservation by saving the facade of the beautiful Beaux-arts Rittenhouse Club. It's far more important building than any of the others. Unless staunch preservationists accept that cities need to accommodate intelligent change, they start to sound like luddites and lunatics.
I'll be writing more on the subject in Friday's column. But please feel free to vent on the issue here and now.
posted by Inga Saffron at 10:46 AM
6 Comments:
Agree with you. It could be a better building, certainly, but the project overall just isn't the objectionable and deifnitely not for the reasons the SOS people are against it.
Hey mark, the issue is not "quaint streetscapes" -- those streetscapes make a city feel livable, make a block part of a vital urban fabric, link past and present, lure tourist dollars. Philadelphia is a rarity in the 21st century -- a "walking city" and scale of buildings and parking garages with no sidewalk contributions (900 block anyone?) detract from everyone's experience of the city. And if you want to bring jobs downtown, then some of the larger, more complex issues to look at might be issues like mass transit (to bring workforce in and out), city wage tax and the groan-inducing business privilege tax.
As for Stern and hack-rate work -- have a look at the truly wretched Stern building just completed on the greensward at Penn. Sigh. What a wasted opportunity. I don't understand the siting. And the design is post-modern blah. So, I guess I'm suggesting Stern's the go-to guy for great post-modern blah.
I can't imagine that no one challenged Mr Brownlee's assertion that building booms don't produce good architecture. Surely in Philadelphia the 1850s, 1920s, and 1980s contradict his dictum. To use the PSFS building as the only standard is sactamonius, pompos, acedemic dribble. The most modern skyscrapers of the late 1980s are much more interesting and trilling than the squat rectilinear boxes of the 1970s.
Trump Tower/Parking Podium
A high rise building whether residential or commercial that sits on the street grid with it's base serving as a parking facility is in every way an affront to the nature of the street and the pedestrian who passes by it. But we shouldn't be to hasty to apply this criticism to the proposed Trump Tower. This building site is much like a suburban space that exists independantly from the dense 18th and 19th c. street grid which makes up most of Philadelphia. How it got that way isn't at issue but at this point in time it may make sense to treat it like one would an Atlantic City casino which one appraoches only by auto.
Brownlee Comments on PSFS
PSFS was not a product of the depression but was deigned, planned and financed in the years from 1926 until nov 1929 when ground was broken, coincidentially a week after the stock market crashed. It's architecture at it's greatest comming out of the 1920s building boom!!!
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