Philadelphia 2035 (Franklin, Churchill, Republic: segregation, democratic, veterans)

[asiandudeyo]

Originally Posted by cpomp

Inga's take, (spoiler... she hates it, lol)


Museum of the American Revolution's building at odds with revolutionary content

Inga never likes anything. LOL
She is very condescending in this article. Although she might have a point in regard to the excessive space.

[thedirtypirate]

Originally Posted by asiandudeyo

Inga never likes anything. LOL
She is very condescending in this article. Although she might have a point in regard to the excessive space.

This is the best part in my opinion:

Though the three-story Revolution museum contains a total of 118,000 square feet of space, a mere 32, 000 of that is devoted to exhibit galleries and interpretative theaters. Like the National Constitution Center and the National Museum of American Jewish History, the building feels like a sprawling banquet hall that happens to operate a small museum.
You sense the bigness the moment you walk into the main lobby. Designed in a relatively subdued fashion that might be called Stripped-Down Georgian, it could be the lobby of an affluent suburban high school. The large open space is backstopped by a ticket desk and flows into another sizable room, this one dominated by a large curved staircase. Even when these rooms are eventually filled with noisy schoolchildren, I suspect there will still be plenty of acreage left over.

lol... Though I totally agree with the part about such a low percentage of space being devoted to the exhibits. A lot of museums I have been to all over the place suffer from this. That's why places like the PMA and the Met are so special. The moment you lay eyes on the buildings, you begin to feel the experience. If anyone remembers, when they began construction the renderings were slightly different.

[cpomp]

Originally Posted by asiandudeyo

Inga never likes anything. LOL
She is very condescending in this article. Although she might have a point in regard to the excessive space.

The only building I can recall that she loved is the new Drexel Student Center on 34th St, and rightfully so. Shes usually negative though.

[kyb01]

Originally Posted by cpomp

I was active in elections since 2012, (however I was a registered voter in Delaware County, I never switched my residency to Philadelphia, and I am very young btw lol). Many of the voters in Philadelphia are so brain dead that it will take one heck of a battle to change the political landscape in Philadelphia, quite literally the battle of the century, and I don't think most Millennials are up for that. :/

Yes, I'm remembering how young you are and how I'm old enough to be your granny and then some! Lol

One of the most troubling things I noticed about the Bernie Sanders "band wagon" thing was the fact that it never seemed to matter to his young supporters that he's a 70something geezer. They should be making the decisions about what direction we should be going in not him.

The political landscape has to change here. There's no choice. You can't wait for every Boomer to die off since there are still a lot of Boomers. Obama is technically a Boomer, for instance.

[kyb01]

Originally Posted by cpomp

Inga's take, (spoiler... she hates it, lol)


Museum of the American Revolution's building at odds with revolutionary content

When you win a Pulitzer(weeee!)you dang well can toss a lot of shade at something you couldn't possibly execute/finance or construct because you have no genuine skills. She's dead to me in any case. No developer gives a damn what she says anyhow.

[ElijahAstin]

Originally Posted by kyb01

Yes, I'm remembering how young you are and how I'm old enough to be your granny and then some! Lol

One of the most troubling things I noticed about the Bernie Sanders "band wagon" thing was the fact that it never seemed to matter to his young supporters that he's a 70something geezer. They should be making the decisions about what direction we should be going in not him.

The political landscape has to change here. There's no choice. You can't wait for every Boomer to die off since there are still a lot of Boomers. Obama is technically a Boomer, for instance.

I'm a Millennial, and while I think we should be taking up leadership roles and joining the conversation, we need more maturity and experience before steering the ship as a generation. The oldest among us are just hitting their mid-30s, after all.

Among political elites (and the aspiring elite), the correlation between age and progressivism seems fairly modest, anyway. I'm not a fan of retrograde, characteristically "boomer" ideas, but many baby boomers (such as yourself!) don't exhibit them.

[kyb01]

Originally Posted by ElijahAstin

I'm a Millennial, and while I think we should be taking up leadership roles and joining the conversation, we need more maturity and experience before steering the ship as a generation. The oldest among us are just hitting their mid-30s, after all.

Among political elites (and the aspiring elite), the correlation between age and progressivism seems fairly modest, anyway. I'm not a fan of retrograde, characteristically "boomer" ideas, but many baby boomers (such as yourself!) don't exhibit them.

I've said multiple times, when we've discussed local politics, that Ed Rendell became DA at 35. If he was smart enough and mature to pull that off some of you must be too. Consider that to do that he had to convince lots of Greatest Generation voters to vote for him.

Many progressive Boomers died early. AIDS killed a lot of those progressive Boomers for instance. Many of us elder gays are still feeling that loss to a certain extent.

[ElijahAstin]

Originally Posted by kyb01

I've said multiple times, when we've discussed local politics, that Ed Rendell became DA at 35. If he was smart enough and mature to pull that off some of you must be too. Consider that to do that he had to convince lots of Greatest Generation voters to vote for him.

Many progressive Boomers died early. AIDS killed a lot of those progressive Boomers for instance. Many of us elder gays are still feeling that loss to a certain extent.

I'm not saying younger people can't take on certain leadership rules. There's always precocious and dynamic individuals that rise to the challenge early. I just don't believe it's necessary or prudent to tell everyone over Age X: pass the torch now! Do not collect 200 dollars.

[MarketStEl]

Before I continue with my reply, I should perhaps disclose that Inga and I are acquainted. She actually holds me in fairly high regard, and I think she offers cogent insights too - that Pulitzer wasn't an accident.

There's a good chance that we will hang out at my former Penn colleague Troy Everwine's bar up in Tacony in the not too distant. (She spoke with Everwine and his silent business partner Mike "Scoats" Scotese in her column on "middle neighborhoods." I have something on that subject in the works as well; in fact, I'm avoiding finishing it right now.)

Originally Posted by asiandudeyo

Inga never likes anything. LOL
She is very condescending in this article. Although she might have a point in regard to the excessive space.

Originally Posted by thedirtypirate

This is the best part in my opinion:

[go back to the original post to see the excerpt]

lol... Though I totally agree with the part about such a low percentage of space being devoted to the exhibits. A lot of museums I have been to all over the place suffer from this. That's why places like the PMA and the Met are so special. The moment you lay eyes on the buildings, you begin to feel the experience. If anyone remembers, when they began construction the renderings were slightly different.

I think her point about Georgian architecture not scaling well is also well taken. Robert A.M. Stern Associates has made a name for itself in dusting off the 18th century for reuse in the 20th, but there IS usually something just a little off in its recycling projects. The LDS meetinghouse is about as close as he has come locally to getting the proportions and scale right.

And Stern can do modernism well. His firm also gave us the giant USB drive known as the Comcast Center.

Of which speaking, if Saffron has a bias, it's towards modernism. More below.

Originally Posted by cpomp

The only building I can recall that she loved is the new Drexel Student Center on 34th St, and rightfully so. Shes usually negative though.

When she does like something, she's as lavish in her praise as she is scathing in her criticism. Even though we lost a very handsome Philadelphia School structure to get it, Skirkanich Hall at Penn is far from awful, and she heaped encomiums on it when it was completed, calling it "Philadelphia's best new building in years."

She has generally been less than enthusiastic about projects Carl Dranoff has undertaken (that's an understatement as far as Symphony House is concerned), which is why even I took notice when she raved about the as-yet-unbuilt SLS International Hotel and Residences:

Saffron Shocker: A Carl Dranoff Building She Loves | Property | Philadelphia Magazine

Originally Posted by kyb01

When you win a Pulitzer(weeee!)you dang well can toss a lot of shade at something you couldn't possibly execute/finance or construct because you have no genuine skills. She's dead to me in any case. No developer gives a damn what she says anyhow.

I couldn't finance, design or build anything either. I never followed through on my expressed wish to become an architect in childhood. (As close as I came was a drafting course in high school and a trip to Chicago to see the buildings of the Chicago School architects up close and personal as I was writing a paper on them during that course.) But I did discover I could write well, and what am I doing now? Writing about buildings. Same as she's doing. I suspect that anything I might say about Tom Scannapieco's next tower won't keep him from building it, and I'm pretty certain that my offhand remark to Greg Heller about how Cecil Baker "phoned in" his design for the Chinatown plot had little bearing on his ultimate decision in favor of the WRT-designed Pennrose proposal. But if I don't like something, I'll still say so, though I usually try to be gentle in my trashing. And that something will probably rise anyway if its backers can line up the financing and get the necessary approvals. (Another case in point: Harman Deutsch Architecture I refer to as "the McDonald's of Modernism" because the firm's designs are, with rare exceptions, formulaic and pretty predictable (though not unattractive by and large). Baker fired a bon mot at one of their designs for an apartment building on Broad below Washington during a Civic Design Review hearing. But lots of developers turn to HD to design their projects because that firm also knows its way through the permitting maze like no other in this city.

(Edited to add: And while I haven't gone public - that is, written a column - concerning it, I think many of you know what I think of the City Branch portion of the Rail Park project. Over on Philadelphia Speaks, I trashed Paul Van Meter's rhapsody about it, calling it "the most elegant empty prose" I had ever read. Looks to me like the Friends of the Rail Park will be able to raise the money to make that misfired idea for a park in a tunnel happen.)

We do what we do. You're free to take our opinions with as large or small a grain of salt as you wish.

[southbound_295]

Originally Posted by ElijahAstin

I'm a Millennial, and while I think we should be taking up leadership roles and joining the conversation, we need more maturity and experience before steering the ship as a generation. The oldest among us are just hitting their mid-30s, after all.

Among political elites (and the aspiring elite), the correlation between age and progressivism seems fairly modest, anyway. I'm not a fan of retrograde, characteristically "boomer" ideas, but many baby boomers (such as yourself!) don't exhibit them.

Some food for thought. . .

When Boomers were in high school, the Vietnam War draft was going on. Anti-war protests were a regular thing. There were also protests concerning racial & gender discrimination. It was the age of protests. The voting age was 21. One of the anti-war chants concerned the reality that an 18 year old could be drafted & sent to 'Nam to kill &/or be killed, but couldn't vote. When the age to vote was lowered, they said we wouldn't vote. We proved them wrong.

Boomers are the bridge generation. I remember hearing an announcement that the last Civil War veteran had died. My parents & grandparents knew Civil War veterans. For the most part, we have adapted to the new & modern. Some is an improvement to the world that we were born into, other things. . .not so much. We were born into a country where there was segregation, women were denied jobs based on gender, & outright paid up to half of what the men made. Things aren't fixed completely, but it's better. The object of the game shouldn't be to blame us for everything that isn't right, but to pick up the fight & carry it to the finish line.