My Built Environment: Good, Bad, and Really Ugly

I found this during one of my wandering adventures the other day. Now I admit this isn’t particularly ugly, but just plain stupid. In this development I found several blocks of homes that had an alley running behind them. That is all fine and good. Trouble is, most of the homes were built with front load garages, and not alley load garages. In this particular development, this is a waste of resources since the front load homes require a fairly substantial setback. This leaves the homes with a very small backyard. The few rear load homes that were built, had shorter front setbacks, and bigger backyards. The second problem is, this was just a waste of land and resources to build the alley, that won’t get used for its intended purpose. Sometimes, I wonder what developers/builders and homebuyers are thinking.

This past weekend we went camping for our last trip of the season. We happen to have a tent trailer, which we love for camping. I don’t know how many of you go camping, but those of you that do know that all campgrounds have one way loops in them. That is fine, but in the vast majority of the sites we camp in, we have to back the trailer into them. Not a big deal, but invariably, the back in spaces are designed in the opposite direction of the one way loop…so you have to go around the loop in the wrong direction to have a prayers chance of getting into the camp site. I find this idiotic, but have resigned myself to it. Now this particular camping site took the cake…it was actually pretty easy to get into it, but after I backed in, I realized the whole campsite was totally backwards! RV’s are universally designed to have the doors on the right side (when you are facing to the front of the trailer) with hookups and such on the left side. This campsite was backwards. The picnic table area was on the left side of the trailer, with the hookups on the right! This was the first time I had run into this. Of course, I had to borrow an extension cord to hookup. Walking around the campground, I notice a considerable number of campsites that were backwards. I am ashamed to admit that it is largely people in my profession that design campgrounds…and obviously, the ones who design them, don’t camp! Guess I need to figure out how to get some of these projects.

OK, so I am a couple of days late posting, but I found this one in January! This wonderful project is a perfect example of what not to do for project planning and streetscape design! This particular apartment project is in Castle Rock, Colorado, next door to one of my projects. They both were designed and approved roughly at the same time, but what a difference in concepts and execution!

The apartment home site was originally a beautifully sloping site vegetated with scrub oak and other native plants. The developers of the apartment homes probably had a standard building plan they wanted to use (usually on flat sites), so in order to get that product to work on this site, they had to construct some incredible retaining walls to pull this off. The picture shows the result of what happened along the public street adjacent to the site. Not only are the walls incredibly tall (around 40 feet at one point), they were designed without any anesthetics in mind. There is no variation in color, no pattern, nothing. Just a huge homogeneous wall. Then, they didn’t even bother to screen it plant material, trees, or shrubs. Just a few trees scattered here and there. Ugly.

Watch for my other post of our project coming up shortly.

The other day I was driving down C-470 in south Denver, when my eye was caught by this housing development. I simply had to get off the interstate and explore this one…and I could not believe my eyes! This has to be one of the worst developments I have seen, particularly for townhomes! The first picture is what you see when you first drive into the development…nothing but a solid row of garage doors! There is no focal point, there is no sense of community, no sense of arrival. Nothing but a series of garage doors. The other side of the buildings isn’t much better. This is what visitors see when they come to your home…nothing but lined up porches, with little to break it up, or identify one unit from the next. In the front there isn’t even any differentiation in the architecture…talk about boring!

I am blown away by three things…that a developer would build something like this, that a jurisdiction would approve it…and even more surprised that buyers would buy this! Granted, this parcel of land was landlocked between two apartment complexes, and was long and narrow, but I would think that something else could have been done. Something to give this development some sense of arrival, some focal point. Sacrifice a few units to create something special. How about being proud of something that you build?

The November fugly award goes to a particular streetscape in the Greeley area. In this streetscape, somebody decided to plop down some large boulders as landscape elements. Now we use boulders all the time, but to be properly done, they need to be partially buried to look more or less natural. Not these, they were just plopped on top of the ground! And not just in turf areas, but in the concrete areas of the splitter islands for the round-a-bout. These look hideous. Not only are they out of scale, they aren’t buried properly, nor are they grouped to look some kind of setting. Nope…plop one here, one there, totally random.

Too bad, this was a nice project overall.