Clt Dwellings Team 🌆🏙️🏘️

I think the thing that kills me the most about towns/cities permitting departments…is they make ‘doing it the right way’ so unbelievably difficult sometimes. Example: I am trying to install new digital menu boards. Simply replacing the old static ones for new digital ones. Town: -oh we need to run all new light pollution studies then -oh we’re gonna check all your parking lot lights while we’re at it -oh we need to double check this doesn’t hinder a ladder truck from driving over your building -oh we need to inspect the footers before you pour any concrete -no you absolutely can not assign the permit to a new certified vendor doing the identical work -how many seats did you say were in the dining room? Might need to add a sprinkler system -we need to bring in the signage department now too because digital menu boards are now considered signage -are you bricking up the base of the footers? It’s not required by code, but we’re requiring it 🤗 Could have just done the whole thing in an afternoon & never heard a peep. Now this project is on month 13, with 4 different permit offices involved, 3 engineers, and no end in sight

In Tokyo most elementary schools are at 100% walking rate.

61: Small Public Squares Every town needs a square, but too large and they feel deserted. Build them smaller than you think. The short side should be under 70 feet, ideally 45 to 60. Seventy feet is the limit at which people can read facial expressions and communicate easily.

Why have buildings gotten less beautiful? A few theories: 1) The world wars: Something in the human spirit changed after World War I. Art is always a reflection of its time period, and the paintings people made in 1913 looked nothing like the ones they made in 1923. The acceleration of new styles like dadaism, surrealism, constructivism, and art deco was the byproduct of the introspection we had to do after millions of people died during World War I and the introduction of mechanized warfare. Whatever hope was left in the traditional way of doing things was shattered with World War II, when we almost committed civilizational suicide again. The shadow of the world wars still hangs over the modern world. 2) The professional class: In aesthetic fields, highly trained people often develop tastes that are uncorrelated with the tastes of the masses to signal that they're part of the in-crowd. In the world of architecture, this is known as "the design disconnect." Studies have shown that the tastes of architecture students are diametrically opposed to the tastes of the general public. The same pattern holds in other artistic mediums. 3) Regulation: Many of the things people love are illegal to build now. There is a restaurant I like to eat at in New York with two exit signs. On the bottom is the classic one, which is beautiful. On top is what looks to be a city-mandated one, which is boring and generic. I've shared a photo below. And there are good reasons for these regulations: exit signs save lives, fire risks in cities have gone down, and modern cars are safer than old ones. Zooming out, you can see how thousands of little regulations like this slowly add up to a more boring world. Like a collection of pebbles in a river, adding a few regulations is no big deal, but everything changes if you add enough. Regulations are also why we can no longer build the kinds of neighborhoods people love, such as Beacon Hill in Boston or the West Village in NYC. That said, I'm not against regulation! I'm grateful for the preservation movements that've protected these neighborhoods from the wrath of modernism. 4) Changing values: Efficiency and convenience rule the day now. We want things fast and cheap. We increasingly see the world through the lens of a spreadsheet, which gives disproportionate weight to things that can be measured. And the more bureaucratic our world becomes, the more people need to justify their decisions using "rational" numbers-driven language. 5) Profit maximization: This is the answer most people jump to, and I've deliberately kept it away from the top of the list because people overestimate its importance. They'll look at objects like the beautiful dolphin lampposts on the London Embankment and say, "we can't afford to decorate things like this anymore." But those lampposts were mass-produced. My point is that many things are ugly because of bad taste, not a lack of funding. Like the Obama library in Chicago. I don't think it's crazy to say that we could've done better with the $850 million it cost to build it. But on the profit maximization point, I'll concede one thing: designing something beautifully is rarely the cheapest way to do things. But that doesn't mean you have to break the bank to make something beautiful. 6) It was a deliberate choice: In 1910, the architect Adolf Loos wrote an essay called Ornament and Crime where he famously argued that culture progresses with "the removal of ornamentation from utilitarian objects." He believed that austere designs were rational, honest, and modern. This is the world we live in today. Almost everything, from our lampposts to our benches to our buildings has been stripped of texture and decoration. So indeed, "ugly is a choice." Our society is immensely wealthy and technologically capable, and we can build more beautifully if we want to.

250 Broadway using potential future ticker tape parades for commercial leases