Wow, I'm not an architecture critic by any means and certainly not an historic preservationist, but sheesh, the last two major changes to that building are insulting to the surrounding context. The pre 1960 version of the building could have been modernized inside and still been very useful but also respectful to the context.
I like the new one as an office, but the department store panel wrap is ugly. That was pretty common back then, for some reason. Lots of towns still have buildings with panels or giant mansards or some other weird way of covering up the original facade.
Agree the latest isn't horrible looking but it is still not great for the pedestrian context with long, blank, featureless walls. That's really what I mean by "insulting". I am sure they closed everything off with those panels so they were not constrained in any way on how they configured in the interior. My guess is larger stores started to move to a standardized layout and this let them implement it in an older building. The last step in that process was to go to primarily 1 story mall layouts. All easy to say in hindsight...
Wow, I'm not an architecture critic by any means and certainly not an historic preservationist, but sheesh, the last two major changes to that building are insulting to the surrounding context. The pre 1960 version of the building could have been modernized inside and still been very useful but also respectful to the context.
I like the new one as an office, but the department store panel wrap is ugly. That was pretty common back then, for some reason. Lots of towns still have buildings with panels or giant mansards or some other weird way of covering up the original facade.
Agree the latest isn't horrible looking but it is still not great for the pedestrian context with long, blank, featureless walls. That's really what I mean by "insulting". I am sure they closed everything off with those panels so they were not constrained in any way on how they configured in the interior. My guess is larger stores started to move to a standardized layout and this let them implement it in an older building. The last step in that process was to go to primarily 1 story mall layouts. All easy to say in hindsight...