KCRag Forum

ComandanteCero wrote:

I think on a scale of 1-10 just about any building with a parking podium set-up on a main street immediately loses 6 points.  Those things are fugly.  Ground level retail helps, but it's no cure all.  At street level, you end up noticing the first 5 stories the most, so having the ground level be retail, with the next 3-4 stories parking is pretty annoying (in fact in Chicago, which has had a rash of these kinds of buildings in this last boom they are hated.  There are even talks of ordinances against it.) 

What ends up happening, as you walk down a street, is that you have a sense of dead space right above the street, and then activity a couple of stories up (which you can't perceive or see because it's already too high).  By activity i mean curtains are haphazardly open, lights are on, maybe a person or two are at their window, or you see someone working at their desk, it gives that sense of energy, informal interaction, of walking through a working and bustling district).  Even if you don't pay explicit attention to these details, they still shape one's sense of a street unconsciously (which is why many Chicago developers have tried to put up fake facades, some even going so far as to try to put in half open curtains in these fake windows..... needless to say it doesn't work, and is even more depressing). 

Visually speaking, the layered look of the building (explicitly showing retail, then parking, then office) doesn't do much for me, it looks almost like someone took the parking garage next to the TWA building and plopped an office building on top.  Lame. 

The fact that the building takes up the whole block because of its parking is also really annoying.

Everything else, style, proportions, etc etc is kind of irrelevant to me without addressing the podium parking issue.  When i walk down the street i'll be looking at the first 5 stories off the ground, not this rendering.

GRID wrote: I'm not sure how well a 17 story building would be accepted in the river market area.  It would be out of scale there.

I honestly think we need to try to keep the high rises in the loop, or even the crossroads.

trailerkid wrote: With the restaurant/nightlife portion of the P+L District as busy as it is...why doesn't CWB look at developing this block with retail/restaurants to complement the P+L? The office portion could be added in a phase II. They could try to expand the energy of the Live! block to the adjacent block on Grand. Bring in some more familiar tenants like Maggiano's, PF Chang's, Red Robin-- and what about a multi-level book store? CWB could even turn this block into something like Block E in MPLS.

I don't understand why everyone is letting Cordish completely monopolize the "flashmob" sized crowds that gather in the area. I think there is enough demand in the immediate area to support many more blocks of development. More people would come downtown if they knew there were more options clustered together. Like KC(P) said, he's started to avoid P+L on the weekends just because of the crowds. Adding more complementary development will only help downtown further its growing repuation as the place for dining and entertainment.

KCMax wrote: Totally agree. Look at the wait times for restaurants during events and weekends. There is much more that can be supported than what Cordish is giving us.

Highlander wrote: One thing I noted when I was in KC was that the P&L District is a pretty well buffered area.  On the south it's bordered abrubtly by I-470, to the east by the Sprint Center, to the west by a construction zone (at least for the time being) and a development that has not yet even filled in.  To the north there are two large parking garages that separate the district from the remainder of downtown.  It's difficult to fit anything in that would create contiguous development with the area around the Transamerica building.  That might be an easy distance to traverse for downtown workers and residents but to average patron at the P&L District, it is out of sight and out of mind.  As far as creating a captive audience, Cordish has done very well.  It may be a while before we see advantages from spillover except on event nights at the Sprint Arena and even then, I understand that venues within the loop but outside the District do not do all that well.