DuCharme Place opens in Lafayette Park

[hybridy]

How did this pass planning commission? i applaud developers for covering the parking, but it's pretty disgusting that there is nothing [[units, amenities, retail) at grade.



https://detroit.curbed.com/2017/5/8/...lafayette-park

[Honky Tonk]

How did this pass planning commission? i applaud developers for covering the parking, but it's pretty disgusting that there is nothing [[units, amenities, retail) at grade.



https://detroit.curbed.com/2017/5/8/...lafayette-park

Are you kidding? Here's the link to their website:

https://www.apartments.com/ducharme-...it-mi/pdgkglt/

Across the street you have Lafayette Foods, a few restaurants, and some shopping within walking distance. Or do you need a Blight Rail to take you there? You can ride your bike to the Dequindre cut-offs, and then to Eastern Mark-Up. You're also walking distance from Downtown, and the coliseums. I think they'll do great.

[Junjie]

Are you kidding? Here's the link to their website:

https://www.apartments.com/ducharme-...it-mi/pdgkglt/

Across the street you have Lafayette Foods, a few restaurants, and some shopping within walking distance. Or do you need a Blight Rail to take you there? You can ride your bike to the Dequindre cut-offs, and then to Eastern Mark-Up. You're also walking distance from Downtown, and the coliseums. I think they'll do great.

Bad design is bad design, regardless of what's around it. Blank, block-length walls facing pedestrians at ground level is bad design.

[hybridy]

Are you kidding? Here's the link to their website:

https://www.apartments.com/ducharme-...it-mi/pdgkglt/

Across the street you have Lafayette Foods, a few restaurants, and some shopping within walking distance. Or do you need a Blight Rail to take you there? You can ride your bike to the Dequindre cut-offs, and then to Eastern Mark-Up. You're also walking distance from Downtown, and the coliseums. I think they'll do great.

i'm specifically referencing the building design, not the neighborhood.

[swingline]

None of the rest of Lafayette Park has much pedestrian orientation but that doesn't mean that this project had to perpetuate outdated mid 20th century urban design principles.

The project adds nice density to the neighborhood but the fortress-like automobile gates and the complete absence of an easily identifiable main lobby entrance promote an unfortunate "visitors not welcome" vibe. Presumably some landscaping will be softening the hundreds of feet of metal screening of the ground level parking.

With its amenities, location and upscale unit features, DuCharme Place will be a nice place to live. There's not a lot of room to complain about shiny new market rate units being added to the city. But the built project completely whiffed on an opportunity to activate street life or create a pedestrian connection to the shopping across the street.

[casscorridor]

Bad design is bad design, regardless of what's around it. Blank, block-length walls facing pedestrians at ground level is bad design.

Ground level apartments with front doors facing the street would have been preferable, but unfortunately the need for parking supersedes. This is for logical reasons, Detroit has almost no existent public transport so you can't reasonably expect to sell new housing units without parking.

[southen]

It is fortress like and if you examine the building closely it looks cheap and the exterior paneling was poorly installed. I wish they took more cues from the nearby townhomes or did something more reminiscent of the Ellington in midtown. I think this is what happens when developers first start testing the market, the cheap out on design and materials. I'm hopeful that future projects will be of higher quality than was we have seen here and at Orleans Landing.

[Jason]

DuCharme Place builds upon the vision of the park’s original development team by creating a community integrated with nature to support the existing historic district,” explained Michael Poris, AIA, Principal of McIntosh Poris Associates. “To respect the site, we wanted the relationship with nature to be a driving factor behind the design. We organized the buildings around landscaped courtyards, so every unit has great views and abundant natural light.

They recognize that the project's association with Lafayette Park is valuable and so they try to explain how this project is part of Lafayette Park in all of their statements.

But there's a massive mismatch between their statements and the actual design. The actual design is just their standard apartment building. Same building products and detailing and the same strategy. http://www.mcintoshporis.com/project...en-apartments#

The building is appropriate for Woodward in midtown, but you can't just take the same building and plonk it down in Lafayette Park and act like putting landscaping on the parking's roof is the same as actually designing for the site.

If they were designing for the site, they wouldn't HAVE to follow Lafayette Park's strategy. It would be possible to have good design reasons for taking a different route. But their statements all indicate that they were trying to work within Lafayette Park's framework. If you told Mies that, his cigar would drop, Hilberseimer would get visibly agitated, and Caldwell would flip a table.

The thing is, is based on their statements they knew what should have been done. And individually I think they're knowledgeable enough to be able to do it. But their firm is very simply not set up to do design like that. And that's how it is, fine, just don't lie about the work that was done.


At the same time, even though it's a lovely site, there are still difficulties. There are a lot of units there, and in order to fit them on the site using that cheaper construction type, some of their choices were unavoidable. To do a different massing you'd either need to reduce the number of units or use a more expensive construction type. And I think this is also a HUD project [[with a long history), and they have additional requirements.

Speaking generally, it's not so much that they did a bad job, it's that they did a job that was completely independent of the site. Maybe seeing it in person in a few years when the plants have matured I'll warm to it.

[Scottathew]

I hope that they plan to do landscaping. A plan like this, without landscaping, would not fly in most suburbs.

[ABetterDetroit]

Tough crowd here. Density? Check. Street-wall? Check. Is the parking not in your face? Check. 188 New units somewhere else besides midtown or downtown... Fantastic.

I have walked by several times, as of last week landscaping was going in already completely irrigated to the sidewalk on Lafayette.

Works for me, this location is not on Grand Circus Park across the street from The David Whitney Building but more like across the street from a strip mall that could use more residents with debit cards in their pockets ready to spend.

[Shai_Hulud]

To me, it has a bit of a dormitory look. It would not be my first choice, but I'm sure that it will fill up fast and I'm glad that it will.

[Jason]

But why should there be a street wall?

There are different types of urban forms, and in some of them street walls provide unity, order, and spatial definition.

But in Lafayette Park there are no street walls. Human scaled spaces are enclosed by a dynamic arrangement of parallel and perpendicular freestanding object-like building masses.

DuCharme Place has a streetwall, but since it's not adjacent to any other streetwalls it's not defining any space or doing any of the other things that streetwalls normally do.

[ABetterDetroit]

But why should there be a street wall?

There are different types of urban forms, and in some of them street walls provide unity, order, and spatial definition.

But in Lafayette Park there are no street walls. Human scaled spaces are enclosed by a dynamic arrangement of parallel and perpendicular freestanding object-like building masses.

DuCharme Place has a streetwall, but since it's not adjacent to any other streetwalls it's not defining any space or doing any of the other things that streetwalls normally do.

Maybe for maximum density out of the footprint, or at the very least to save us from looking at a parking lot full of cars then the building behind or to the side of that. I am not an architect so these are only guesses.

If someone is looking for outstanding architecture in new construction, there will have to be multiple developers competing at the same time to out do each other on their devolopments and raise the bar.

[mikehamm45]

it is still better than empty storefronts, Maybe they can plant some shrubs in front of it

[archfan]

it is still better than empty storefronts, Maybe they can plant some shrubs in front of it

Ivy is the traditional choice for covering architectural mistakes.

[Bham1982]

There is no streetwall in Lafayette Park. It's a suburban-style development grafted upon the ashes of a thriving urban neighborhood.

The new development looks fine to me. Looks fairly nice, even. It better, as taxpayers enabled this [[largely funded by state redevelopment credits).