April Fuglie

Okay, I will admit, this is not fugly, just plain dumb. It also isn't often I give a fugly award to a project that I just gave high accolades too (see previous post). But as part of the Seventh Street reconstruction project, the planners decided to add diaganol parking, that you have to BACK INTO! I can only imagine the fender benders that are going to occur with someone stopping in traffic, starting to back up into the parking spot, only to have the person behind them not notice and running into them. This parking situation has had such an outcry against it, that the planners have decided to never do it again. Don't get me wrong, I think diagonal parking is a great idea, and should be encouraged on more streets, but done the traditional way with pulling in forwards, and then backing out. A lot less dangerous in my opinion.

Google Earth Visits - Detroit

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I will admit that I have never been to Detroit, nor have I ever had any inkling too, but with all the recent press that Detroit has been getting with regards to the automobile industry, and the state of the housing economy there, I thought I would make a Google visit. As with most of my tours, I start with the downtown area. I immediately became intrigued with Detroit with the overall layout of downtown. All the major streets are broad parkways that are heavily landscaped, and all of these parkways pinwheel out from a central park. Very nice indeed, and a classic layout seen in many great cities. I also like the fact that the ballparks are oriented to the adjacent streets. The whole downtown area is very pedestrian friendly (at least from bird's eye), and extraordinarily well laid out.

Of course, from the air, you also see the downside. There is a tremendous amount of surface parking lots, and a fair amount of empty space between buildings. This provides opportunity for infill, with a good structure already in place. This of course, ignores the current economic climate of Detroit.


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Now one of the things that amazed me even more, was traveling less than a mile and a half outside of downtown, and there are blocks and blocks and blocks of vacant land...street are there, but few structures. I have to ask myself, what happened here? In most cities, you see very dense neighborhoods fairly close to the city core. And this isn't unique to this one area of Detroit, cruising around, this goes on for miles.

But why? Is there environmental pollution? Were these neighborhoods intentionally torn down, was there some kind of great fire? If you go miles out from the city core, you can find all kinds of new home development going on (or at least there was). So why has the city core all but been abandoned?

With all the talk these days about sustainability and redevelopment, this is an area where redevelopment should be strongly encouraged, in and orderly fashion. Why is the development in the suburbs, eating up raw land and having to extend utilities, when there is all this land close in, with all the infrastructure in place to support new development? I realize I am taking a rather simplistic view of this, as there are all kinds of other factors such as crime rates, environmental concerns, economic concerns etc. But these kinds of issues have been overcome in other areas, so why not here? I think as a society, we need to take a hard look at our priorities, and take a harder look at sprawl and urban development.

If anybody has any insight as to what happened in these neighborhoods of Detroit, I would love to here them!

Fugly December '08

I ran across this project awhile back in Grand Junction, and I was simply floored by it. In this day, with all the design professionals, stringent planning departments, and all, why do we continue to build such fugly housing? I understand the need to build homes that are affordable, but why on earth do we need to build multi-family housing straight as a Kansas Highway?

This particular building has 5 units in it, with the street facade dominated by garages, and hard to find front doors. Why not add on some bumpouts to break up the second floor, add a little ornamentation to the roof line, etc? There are simple things that can be done that adds dramatically to the character, without adding much cost.

What makes this even worse, is that these buildings are lined up barack style, and covered with a drab coloraed vynil siding material. Talk about going from bad to worse. I would have thought we would have learned lessons from all the 60's housing projects that are now being torn down. I guess not.

June 2008 Fugglies

OK, this belong more in the WTF category than ugly. I found this playground in a New Urbanism community. Not just any community, but a very celebrated one that prides itself on its high end and well regulated architecture. So why on earth would they fence in a playground....much less with a chain link fence? I haven't seen chain link fences anywhere else in the community, so I didn't think they were even allowed.

Now I can understand wanting to keep kids out of the street...but there are far better ways of doing it...wrought iron fence comes to mind, with some openings to actually get into the playground. I don't know, all I do is shake my head.

What I Have Been Up To

Sorry to everyone for being out of it for awhile. We have been pretty busy lately with a lot of submittals, and I have been having to write a lot of design guidelines, zoning codes and such, so I havn't been inspired to write in my blog too!

Tomorrow I leave for Vegas for the International Council of Shopping Centers conference. I am going primarily for one of my clients. It should be an interesting experience. I am also looking forward to getting lots of fodder for my Fugly awards, and checking out the local development scene. I know that they are really hurting right now...but they have had an excellent ride for a couple of decades now. There are some really good projects going on there though that I want to check out. I will keep you all updated.

Fugglies March 2008

I found this during one of my wandering adventures the other day. Now I admit this isn't particularly ugly, but just plain stupid. In this development I found several blocks of homes that had an alley running behind them. That is all fine and good. Trouble is, most of the homes were built with front load garages, and not alley load garages. In this particular development, this is a waste of resources since the front load homes require a fairly substantial setback. This leaves the homes with a very small backyard. The few rear load homes that were built, had shorter front setbacks, and bigger backyards. The second problem is, this was just a waste of land and resources to build the alley, that won't get used for its intended purpose. Sometimes, I wonder what developers/builders and homebuyers are thinking.

Campgrounds - September fuglies!

This past weekend we went camping for our last trip of the season. We happen to have a tent trailer, which we love for camping. I don't know how many of you go camping, but those of you that do know that all campgrounds have one way loops in them. That is fine, but in the vast majority of the sites we camp in, we have to back the trailer into them. Not a big deal, but invariably, the back in spaces are designed in the opposite direction of the one way loop...so you have to go around the loop in the wrong direction to have a prayers chance of getting into the camp site. I find this idiotic, but have resigned myself to it. Now this particular camping site took the cake...it was actually pretty easy to get into it, but after I backed in, I realized the whole campsite was totally backwards! RV's are universally designed to have the doors on the right side (when you are facing to the front of the trailer) with hookups and such on the left side. This campsite was backwards. The picnic table area was on the left side of the trailer, with the hookups on the right! This was the first time I had run into this. Of course, I had to borrow an extension cord to hookup. Walking around the campground, I notice a considerable number of campsites that were backwards. I am ashamed to admit that it is largely people in my profession that design campgrounds...and obviously, the ones who design them, don't camp! Guess I need to figure out how to get some of these projects.

Jan. Fugglies

OK, so I am a couple of days late posting, but I found this one in January! This wonderful project is a perfect example of what not to do for project planning and streetscape design! This particular apartment project is in Castle Rock, Colorado, next door to one of my projects. They both were designed and approved roughly at the same time, but what a difference in concepts and execution!

The apartment home site was originally a beautifully sloping site vegetated with scrub oak and other native plants. The developers of the apartment homes probably had a standard building plan they wanted to use (usually on flat sites), so in order to get that product to work on this site, they had to construct some incredible retaining walls to pull this off. The picture shows the result of what happened along the public street adjacent to the site. Not only are the walls incredibly tall (around 40 feet at one point), they were designed without any anesthetics in mind. There is no variation in color, no pattern, nothing. Just a huge homogeneous wall. Then, they didn't even bother to screen it plant material, trees, or shrubs. Just a few trees scattered here and there. Ugly.

Watch for my other post of our project coming up shortly.

December Fuglies

The other day I was driving down C-470 in south Denver, when my eye was caught by this housing development. I simply had to get off the interstate and explore this one...and I could not believe my eyes! This has to be one of the worst developments I have seen, particularly for townhomes! The first picture is what you see when you first drive into the development...nothing but a solid row of garage doors! There is no focal point, there is no sense of community, no sense of arrival. Nothing but a series of garage doors. The other side of the buildings isn't much better. This is what visitors see when they come to your home...nothing but lined up porches, with little to break it up, or identify one unit from the next. In the front there isn't even any differentiation in the architecture...talk about boring!

I am blown away by three things...that a developer would build something like this, that a jurisdiction would approve it...and even more surprised that buyers would buy this! Granted, this parcel of land was landlocked between two apartment complexes, and was long and narrow, but I would think that something else could have been done. Something to give this development some sense of arrival, some focal point. Sacrifice a few units to create something special. How about being proud of something that you build?

November Fugly Award!

The November fugly award goes to a particular streetscape in the Greeley area. In this streetscape, somebody decided to plop down some large boulders as landscape elements. Now we use boulders all the time, but to be properly done, they need to be partially buried to look more or less natural. Not these, they were just plopped on top of the ground! And not just in turf areas, but in the concrete areas of the splitter islands for the round-a-bout. These look hideous. Not only are they out of scale, they aren't buried properly, nor are they grouped to look some kind of setting. Nope...plop one here, one there, totally random.

Too bad, this was a nice project overall.

August Fuglies!

Well, I know that I havn't exactly been keeping up with my fugly awards, but this one has been gnawing at me for some time now. This neighborhood is made up mostly of duplexes, all of them brick. Now I am not knocking brick, but more the overall architecture, or lack thereof. These homes have no characater. Most of them, you can't even find the front door! The door is tucked around the side of the home, with the patio door facing the street! Talk about look alike homes! I really don't see how the homeowners can tell one from the other. But, my bigger question is, who buys these homes, and why?