Quote Originally Posted by Mackinaw View Post
Great photo post. Shows how nicely the building works to interrupt the upper-story streetwall and allow the movement of air and sun. It enhances the desirability of the tall buildings around it, while maintaining enclosure on the street level. In New York this would be both treasured [[for the above reasons) and reviled [[by developers who can certainly justify something taller based on market demand). Here, there is no in-demand commodity that justifies even considering allowing something this beneficial to be torn down. No need for another tall office building. No need for more parking. And to the extent you say we should in fact building more of either/both, then the answer [[and this should be the answer for probably a good three to five decades) is to build on fallow land and surface parking lots. Or on top of the Cobo Roof, haha.
This is nearly an impossible thing to describe from an urban designer's standpoint without pictures like this. I completely agree. Lowrise structures can assist in framing, composing, and celebrating nearby architecture. They assist with viewsheds that would otherwise be dull and uninteresting if it were a dense forest of skyscrapers, difficult to comprehend from extreme oblique angles.

However for lack of height, the lowrise structure must compensate in its architecture. Here that is the case. It also helps if it's a mixture of several buildings, creating a "fine grain streetwall."

This is where the debate heats up in NYC where they recently upzoned buildings heights in Midtown Manhattan. It has huge implications for mass teardowns of the vintage office buildings for boxy glass towers. Could potentially be tragic from an architectural standpoint and lend itself to oppressive scale.