North Coast Online

Butt Ugly

Finally, someone in Buffalo who admits the truth about UB's North Campus.

It is encouraging to read that the president of the University at Buffalo wants to expand UB’s enrollment by 10,000 students and create a great university on a par with America’s top state universities.

However, to think that UB can compete with beautiful campuses such as the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Penn State and the University of Wisconsin (Madison) is laughable. The UB North Campus is probably the ugliest campus in North America.

There’s an assumption that it’s too late to change the campus. Who says it’s too late? Insanity is said to be a type of behavior that makes the same mistake over and over again. Reinforcing the terrible mistake of the North Campus is a form of insanity. There is a practical alternative for transforming the North Campus. It should be converted into what it looks and feels like — a maximum-security prison. The existing North Campus is irredeemable. In order to create a great university that attracts students and faculty, we need a new campus. How about a great shining citadel on a lake — in downtown Buffalo?

Peter Nowak

Buffalo

State University of New York architecture has to rank among some of the worst in the world.  Not only at UB but at virtually any campus.  My alma mater, SUC Fredonia, is located in a beautiful tree-lined village on a huge plot of semi-rural land, but over its history has become a jarring cacophony of mismatched and ill-designed, user-unfriendly buildings.  UB North is much the same but on a much larger scale.

How can this be?  The University at Buffalo has well-respected schools of architecture and urban planning.  Does the rampant ugliness and inefficiency of its campus reflect the teachings of those colleges?  If it does, then Mr. Nowak's suggestion to start anew downtown might be a mistake.

 

Temple Beth Zion

It's the 40th anniversary of the dedication of Temple Beth Zion on Delaware Avenue and I can't do it justice.  Please, if you're not familiar with it, take a ride past (it's on the block just north of Summer Street.)  Better yet, park the car when you get there, get out and walk around it.

It's a spectacular example of late 60's modern architecture just before it morphed into brutalism (think City Court.) Temple Beth Zion is probably one of our last, great architectural commissions.   

Feelings

How a new building feels matters just as much as how it looks.   Seattle built a new downtown library a few years ago to much generally agreed-upon approval.  Now that it's open, Seattleites are having second thoughts.

This library, incredibly, is an uncomfortable place to read. The third-level "Living Room," which has the feel of a vast indoor park, is not conducive to intimacy with a book. It harvests and energizes routine noise; conversations from hundreds of feet away coalesce as ambient babble. The vast overhead space, a thrill to library visitors, works against readers -- most of us instinctively crave small, private spaces when curling up with a book. And "curling up" here is no fun. The foam seats are decidedly unpleasant and are looking shabby -- cracked, torn, stained -- after three years.

This is why I rail against buildings like the federal courthouse, the Hauptmann-Woodward and the Burchfield-Penney -- they just don't look as if they'll "feel" very good.  The fact that they'd be more comfortable in a suburban business park than in an urban downtown also weighs against them.

I find it very odd that in a town that considers itself a little island of artistic sophistication, no one says much about this.

H.T. to City Comforts

That's Not Architecture, That's Just Building

City Comforts Blog links to one Seattleite's "Five Favorite American Buildings."

But actually she is not interested in buildings but in very large-scale sculpture.

Which also seems to be in vogue in Buffalo these days.

But actually she is not interested in buildings but in very large-scale sculpture.

Off Again, On Again, Off Again, On . . .

It appears that money for the shiny, sore thumb of NIagara Square is in Bush's budget.  That's big news, I guess.  Now the dead and half-unoccupied block between Delaware and Elmwood will become a dead and occupied block.

My beef with it is that Niagara Square, which is really quite beautiful, is also the deadest part of an already too-dead downtown.  It's surrounded by buildings completely dedicated to government offices and past 4 pm, not a soul trods the sidewalks.  That's been the case with our entire downtown until only recently but we're making progress. 

Huge buildings such as the proposed courthouse should be scattered around the downtown area and not clustered into one big dead-zone.  The city would be wiser to get together with Bashar Issa and propose a swap:  he could put up his 40 story mixed-use tower on Niagara Square and the new courthouse would be built a couple blocks away across from New Era's headquarters.

All the people living in his Statler-Hilton and his new skyscraper combined with the retail businesses he plans on attracting could offset some of the Sargasso-effect of Niagara Square's current tenants.  And the lack of night street traffic from a courthouse located a block away from Chippewa would hardly be noticed.  Just a thought. 

What Do You Mean, Ugly?

If Acquest can get $19.2 million in tax breaks, it plans a major overhaul of the Dulski Building including, evidently, the facade.

The exterior of the building, which Acquest President William J. Huntress described as "quite ugly," will be stripped down and replaced by something "sleeker and more modern

I've always found the former Federal Building to be rather attractive.  It's exterior is nicely textured, has scale and the fact that it's white sets if off quite nicely from Buffalo's uniformly brown skyline.  Look, guys, if you don't get all the subsidies you're looking for then ditch the exterior make-over. 

It's just not necessary.

Ugly Buildings

After reading the headline, I assumed Donn Esmonde was going to blast the Burchfield-Penney, HealthNow, the proposed Federal Courthouse and Hauptmann-Woodward.  Alas, he's satisfied that a Wal-Mart in Hamburg will have pillars.

I've Solved Downtown's Parking Problem (Really)

I was sorry to read today that Sam Savarino's plans to rehab the Statler didn't work out.

A local developer who was eyeing downtown Buffalo's Statler Towers for conversion to a hotel/office/condominium complex has decided against buying the landmark.

Samuel J. Savarino, president and CEO of Buffalo-based Savarino Companies, confirmed Wednesday that he let a $7.5 million purchase contract for the building expire as of midnight on April 18.

"We decided to let it lapse," Savarino said. "It's a significant Buffalo building that needs to be dealt with in a meaningful way. Maybe we'll get another bite at the apple under more favorable conditions."

Part of the problem was that old downtown bugaboo, parking.

Savarino and his investment partners had estimated that interior and exterior renovations of the Niagara Square landmark would have run in the $50 million to $70 million price range. If their deal would have consummated, they planned to employ a mix of private capital and various tax credit programs to fund the ambitious redevelopment.

They also hoped the City of Buffalo would aid the project by building a parking garage to service the building on a nearby surface parking lot at South Elmwood Avenue and West Mohawk Street. [emphasis mine]

We all know that any mention of new parking downtown instantly sounds the death-knell for the project.  Even if the proposed parking-garage builder is willing to spend  $1/2 million more than his office-building competitor, Buffalo turns the proverbial blind eye.  Yet, we know that parking is still an issue for businesses thinking about locating in downtown Buffalo.  What to do?

In the 1930's, Frank Lloyd Wright proposed a massive and (for the time) imaginatively-designed parking garage to complement the Kaufmann Department Store in downtown Pittsburgh. 

It was never built.  But with the growing inventory of restored FLLW buildings in Buffalo -- and the construction of the boathouse and the gas station which were only drawings, I think the time's come to build a true monument to Wright's genius.

Let's build the original FLLW parking garage in downtown Buffalo.

In one swell foop we'll not onlly cure the downtown parking shortage but satisfy the arts and architectural community.  Who could dare speak against it?  Tourists from across the continent (and no doubt from Europe) will flock here and rent cars -- if only for the chance to park in a garage designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

We'll place it, of course, in a location from which they can gaze upon the glory of the rotting and ugly (but "monstrously" ugly) grain elevators as they exit their Tauruses. 

In fact, I've determined that some 1.2 million such visitors a year will eventually come here to see the parking garage.  And 20% of those will patronize the casino (but only up to the point of bankruptcy) A healthy 1% plan to visit the Broadway Market, although that number drops when they're confronted with pictures of the actual surruounding neighborhood and with the dawning realization that a butter-lamb is well, just butter after all.

Nonetheless, I think it's worth pursuing.  If our aim is to make Buffalo into a huge museum of what-might-have-been, let's do it right and solve a pesky parking problem at the same time.

 

Evidently It Takes A Philistine To Know A Philistine

Buffalo isn't alone in squandering opportunities to create good new architecture.  Washington, D.C. is building a new baseball stadium to house the Nationals.  At least one reviewer finds the design wanting.

What we get with the Nationals' current design is a ballpark bowl enclosed by banal buildings with limestone (or precast concrete, depending on budgetary factors) unimaginatively framing vast expanses of glass. Camden Yards is just 40 miles up the highway, and Washington's Mayor Anthony Williams, determined to rid his city of its philistine reputation, wanted something different. (In 2004 the mayor secured a $40 million subsidy for the Corcoran Gallery's failed effort to fund a controversial Frank Gehry addition.) Alas, hizzonner's insistence on a boldly modern Washington ballpark has backfired, with the architects' emphasis on lightness and transparency yielding buildings suitable for a garden-variety airport terminal.

At least we did the baseball stadium right.  This sounds suspiciously like the Healthnow complex or maybe the new Burchfield-Penney art gallery.  You know, the one that turns its back on the city.  Good review, read the whole thing.

The Gardener's Cottage

The Darwin Martin complex is now complete with the purchase of the Gardener's Cottage.

I hadn't known this was even in the plans but it's (as they say in England) really brilliant.  There's nowhere in the world where you can visit 3 Frank Lloyd Wright houses on one site.  And each of them, the big Martin House, the Barton House and the Cottage are of distinctive styles and were designed for different incomes.   A visit to the Martin complex now becomes a full-day excursion for Wright buffs.

It will take visitors a second day to pass by Wright's two other houses in Buffalo (on Tillinghast and at Soldier's Circle,) hit the gas station, see the boathouse and head down to Derby for a tour through Graycliff.  In the end, I don't really think that architectural tourism (even with all these FLLW gems) will do much for Buffalo's economy -- but it'll help.