Comment 73335

By Undustrial (registered) - website | Posted January 26, 2012 at 13:31:22

An ugly, but not unexpected design. This concept drawing evokes the same sense of utopian naivete that I remember from the first plans I saw for the current 100 Main site and the "Civic Square" which was to surround it. In both cases the fantasy of big-grassy-setback as "public space" or "greenspace" dominates the blueprints, even though all experience tells us it will be neither.

With an implied sense of private (public) property, and a general rule of 'keep off the grass', the current School Board lawn gets as little actual use as it's parking lot, if not less (there are often more people sitting or gathered around the parking lot). On the mountain, with far less foot traffic, there's likely to be even less. Ecologically speaking, these spaces are completely artificial and look more like a golf course than any actual natural space you could name, requiring lots of costly and energy-intensive maintenance (irrigation, mowing, chemicals etc). Unless there's something to close the space off main roads or something to denote it as public park space like trail access (old HPH grounds, etc), these might as well be oversized parking lot islands.

"Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century." — Lewis Mumford

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