Friday Blogwrap
Top of the Forte. Photo by alilovell. Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway Comes to Life [Streetsblog] Will Burg Rezoning Chop Karl Fischer Towers? [Curbed] New Permit For Carroll Gardens Carcass? [Pardon Me For Asking] Ho-Ho-Holiday Recycling Flatbush-Style [Green Brooklyn] Trouble at the Empire Stores in Dumbo [Gowanus Lounge] A Republican Crows in Brooklyn [City Room] Real Estate…
Top of the Forte. Photo by alilovell.
Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway Comes to Life [Streetsblog]
Will Burg Rezoning Chop Karl Fischer Towers? [Curbed]
New Permit For Carroll Gardens Carcass? [Pardon Me For Asking]
Ho-Ho-Holiday Recycling Flatbush-Style [Green Brooklyn]
Trouble at the Empire Stores in Dumbo [Gowanus Lounge]
A Republican Crows in Brooklyn [City Room]
Real Estate Picks [Bed-Stuy Blog]
I used to live in Jersey City (another dumpy city with a lot of ugly new buildings) and a number of the office buildings have strange lights on top that change color and one has a light that runs diagonally from top to bottom. It is really tacky, but this is Jersey after all. It is sad to see this kind of thing in Brooklyn which has wonderful older architecture.
The Forte box does look just awful during the day, and only slightly better at night. Couldn’t they at least triangulated the shape so it wouldn’t look so weird, day or night?
Here’s another glowing-box-on-top building, the Target headquarters in Minneapolis:
http://www.emporis.com/en/il/im/?id=207260
“The upper floors contain a unique lighting display of 130 thirty-foot glass pipes that can be illuminated in any color in any pattern. Light from 575-watt bulbs is shot through each tube and mixed by three color wheels representing the primary colors, and then distributed throughout the pipe by a unique film lining. The technology was developed by the locally-based 3M Corporation.”
Forte could be a lot worse.
I agree with you, 9:10.
I think a new highrise in general adds to the skyline of downtown Brooklyn. It’s nice. We’ve certainly got more than our fair share of beautiful buildings here in Brooklyn to offset a few mediocre ones.
Be grateful to live in such terrific city.
It’s not a brooklyn problem. Ugly condos are everywhere. Look at the upper east side:
http://curbed.com/archives/2007/03/22/development_du_jour_the_lucida.php
http://www.nycondoblog.com/?cat=17
The first is an office building, the second is just glorified projects.
And I think the per sq ft price is around $1,400. So to anyone out there bitching about the condo prices in Brooklyn, this should put things in perspective.
I’m actually really really impressed with the Forte design, for reasonably priced apartments. Compared to other brooklyn condos (see all of williamsburg, esp around McCarren Park) this is downright glamorous.
Why is it Brooklyn gets so many shitty high rise condo developments? It’s not fair.
1:27 Hence the Spanish Oro. Gold St. What’s the next name to use Verde? Guess it looks better than the Oro though it actually looks like a pile of spinach pies from Damascus bakery.
Both Forte and Oro look like they belong in Houston’s skyline during the 80s, which is to say, the way Houston’s skyline looks now. There’s a town that makes Detroit look attractive.
I was able to pick out this glowing box from Top of the Rock the other day. It’s a nice addition to the skyline. It is horrid during the day. Though I think the rest of the building is reasonably attractive, by new-building standards. It’s much better than Luxe+Pop, Metrotech, and Oro, in my opinion. Oro looks like it belongs in Houston’s skyline in the late ’80s.