22 September 2005

the answer is yes

curbed asked "are all new developments ugly" and i'm going affirmative on this one. every time i walk around the city, with a very few exeptions, i am faced with hideous new buildings that stick out like sore thumbs. most of them are these new dorm-looking apartment/condo buildings popping up in every vacant lot of the slope and some areas of chinatown and the les...none of them have any character, they look more like the shit people i know lived in when i was in school in atlanta than anything in their own neighborhood. new york is better than that. we have old, beautiful, significant architecture, and we deserve new, beautiful, significant architecture, or at least new copies of old, beautiful, significant architecture. just up the road from my apartment, someone has stripped a brownstone of all its brown, added an extra floor, put a weird porch or sunroom thing (i think, it's not done, so i don't really know what it is) with a sliding glass door to it, effectively erasing any part of the original structure that made it beautiful and charismatic. i don't want to see any more sliding doors on to balconies. none! and why are they setting everything back like 8 feet from the sidewalk and putting a little patch of grass in front? why!?!?!?

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