I took this picture of two apartment buildings on Rampart just south of Temple. It's a great contrast of the differences created when a building is built around cars and parking, and when it is not.
On the left you can see the sickening result of what happens when developers are required to spend huge amounts of a project's money on installing usually grade-separated parking structures. The rest of the building suffers enormously, not just because the project runs short on funds for things like design and landscaping, but also because the entire complex is built to be entered and exited by car, to be seen through a windshield, to offer an experience on par with the little metal sarcophagus in which its residents spend large parts of their days. Notice the giant FOR RENT banner on the building? The building on the right also has a For Rent sign, but it's stuck into the grassy sidewalk median where people walking by will see it, because there is no parking and the tenants don't bother to advertise to drivers.
On the right you see the result of a project built before Angelenos relied so psychotically on cars, before our city government mandated such pathology and before our citizenry sat by placated, breathing toxic fumes and dying of diabetes. The building on the right has an aesthetic appeal that is meant to be observed for some time, at a walking pace, or even at a standing pace, as someone might have actually been out in front of the building simply enjoying the day. Imagine that! On a street! I mean, not today, because the street is as desolate as a freeway, and the only thing to stroll to is a stripmall on the corner. The building on the right maintains a pedestrian level facade, creating places where people want to enter, unlike the building on the right, which looks like people get dragged into it to have bamboo shoved under their finger nails. The building on the right maintains a consistent streetscape, making it safe for pedestrians and bicyclists to travel in front of it, while the building on the left has a giant driveway with two tons machines roaring in and out of it...doesn't it just look like some kind of Machine-Monster Den?
The building on the left looks like it was designed by a fourth grader, while the building on the right obviously received lots of care and consideration in its design, took its surroundings into account, understood its residents' humanity. These are things we used to do in this country, in urban areas...at least for wealthy people.
But it must be said that clearly when the building on the right was built, the demographics of the area were much different than the demographics of the area in which the building on the left was built. As our city centers emptied of white middle class residents, buildings like that on the left became the norm, because wealthy tax payers now lived 40 miles from where they worked, and none of them lived in apartment buildings in the middle of the city where requiring 1.5 parking spaces for every complex would end up making everyone inside the complex feel like they wanted to stab someone.
And still, around this country we are mystified by urban areas, we criminalize behaviors as the only means to solving the problems we create, we spend hundreds of millions of dollars on guns and prisons and when none of it pays off we buy more guns and more prisons. If we spent even a fraction of that money making sure that buildings like that on the right got built more often, you'd see a city transformed and an entire industry of "public safety professionals" put to shame.
No comments:
Post a Comment