Previous - 63. Hallway
Architecture
A storm is due to arrive in a few hours so I decided to stay closer to home than usual. Instead of my new Peet's, I decided to check out the swarm of closer Starbucks I usually avoid. The one less than two blocks from me I still boycott because it was my favorite local cafe before Starbucks took over and turned it into the most boring of all their locations. The next two (three blocks away) are small and were jammed with tourists. Which brought me to this location, four blocks from my apartment.
I walk past this location all the time -- in fact I walked past twice this morning on my way to and from the gym -- but I hadn't been inside since they remodeled this summer. They kept the counters looking out over the sidewalk (the reason I used to come here to work), but did a nice job of freshening up the space as a whole. The space, though small, seems to have had a grander past judging by the architectural details up near the ceiling. The souvenirs of that past have been left white -- possibly just a tad off-white -- while the functional Starbucks area below is a sort of black box... though with lots of windows on two sides.
Still, all the black below means that the white above catches your eye. I certainly never noticed the details before, perhaps there was a false ceiling? Anyway, Starbucks did well by this space, everything they didn't do to that location closer to me.
From where I'm sitting in their window, I can see both the low-rise building -- finished but un-tenanted -- on the next corner...
...and that building's step sister still rising between the little restaurants on Belden and the surviving grand old buildings on Montgomery.
The reason these buildings are related has to do with the hoops a developer has to jump through to get anything built here. The little building on the corner had to be only four stories tall with the top floor opening onto, and supplementing, St Mary's Park.
When the yellowish fence is removed the part of the top level of the building will become an extension of the park.
The new tower refuses it's left flank, to borrow a military term I'm very fond of, so that the Russ Building next door doesn't lose its light. The facade of the Chamber of Commerce building has also been incorporated into the south side of the project.
The "refusing the left flank" aspect is only visible if you walk further down to the right of this photo -- where I would have been blocked by trucks.
Unfortunately, after all that, the tower itself is enveloped in a glass curtain-wall that takes boring to a new level.
I was so pleasantly surprised by the mild asymmetry of the new hospital rising on Van Ness, that I foolishly allowed myself to think that perhaps that was a new fashion -- no such luck, apparently.
The wires and elevator don't make this easy to read, but the curtain-wall units do not repeat exactly, either vertically or horizontally. I would prefer a bolder asymmetry, but this is a nice alternative to the usual blandness.
Now I'm going to have to wait until I take a bunch of photos before posting this. (Done.) I'm not sure if my rediscovering my camera is a good thing or not.
Let me say that, for once, I have no quibbles with this author's take on the situation. I think he is right on the nose. When my little band of Buffy fans deserted the IMDB message boards for a private forum, it was because they were fed up with the trolls and the idiots. I stayed behind at first because I thought it was, to a large degree, the trolls and idiots that brought us together, and that we would be too small and too similar a group to survive long in isolation. I was neither entirely right or entirely wrong about that: Currently we are pretty quiet as most of the interesting people have offended someone and been booted, leaving an even duller collection of people. As it stands, we lack any sort of story or plot to keep things interesting. We are sometimes helpful or supportive of each other -- which is nice -- but there is no drama.
So going beyond what Haque wrote, the problem with a truly democratic Internet is that it forces you to deal with all the troubled idiots you normally can avoid in "real life." But that is more than just an online problem, as society in general needs to find some way to deal with these people.
Even if you limit the discussion to the Internet (which I don't recommend), if you ban these people, as my Buffy group did, you end up with an inert and boring place people have no need to visit -- just as Haque claims is happening with Twitter.
Some of my fondest memories from back in our IMDB days were when we would gang up on some troll who wandered onto the board and utterly eviscerate them. Ironically it was our Queen and pit-bull (a gay guy from Calgary who would jump in with both feet and verbally kick the shit out of trolls so that they fled, never to be heard from again) who started the new forum. I finally joined because the old IMDB board was a wasteland without my friends who had left. But of the four people who lead the exit, only one is still active. Ironically, I'm one of the more active members at the moment.
What I'm saying is that, as much as Haque's neo-Burkean analysis pleases me, I have no actual clue as to how you would address this problem. Removing the abuse from social media sounds like a good idea, but the result would drive people away due to the lack of dramatic interest. And it would further isolate the already problematic agressives. Personally, that might be nice but socially it's not a solution.
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