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Could you imagine what DC would look like if it didn't have Height limits?
I do like that DC has a height limit, its unique for a large American city to not have a "skyline" and since architecture is a lost industry, I feel like the skyline of DC wouldn't look that great if height limits were increased this day in age.
Probably a skyline up there with San Fran, Philadelphia, Miami, etc.
I do like that DC has a height limit, its unique for a large American city to not have a "skyline" and since architecture is a lost industry, I feel like the skyline of DC wouldn't look that great if height limits were increased this day in age.
Not to start another debate, but DC has the office/hotel/residential downtown square footage of downtown Chicago even now. That's why the downtown core is 2-3 times the land area of cities like Philadelphia, San Fran, and Boston. If you can't build up like NYC and Chicago, the city had to build out to fit all the square footage with height limits.
Removing height restrictions historically in DC would have actually eliminated the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, Pentagon City-Crystal City corridor, downtown Bethesda, downtown Silver Spring, and Tyson's Corner development shifting that square footage into the city because there would be room to build it. The only reason edge cities formed in DC historically is because of height limits.
Probably ugly..... modern architecture save for a few examples here and there is egh at best.
I much prefer it the height limits. It makes the city feel and look unique.
Yea, I also think the height limits create a kind of uniformity that's good with all the variations being in the materials and color used. It's almost like having a collection of something.
I think that's overall quite good. I will say though, I wouldn't mind if DC had been built with just a bit narrower streets.
Precisely. Since everybody is a making up their own arbitrary definitions on the spot since the thread started there's no consensus here. My definitions have already been given, but I'll just make it that much more simple.
If you are standing on the street in between a block full of buildings and the buildings are high enough to enclose you in so that shadows of the buildings cover the whole street and block sunlight. Then you are standing inside of an urban canyon IMO.
Also one small tidbit, the Google Earth camera on top of the car is already about 15 feet in the air, so any "street level" pictures from Google maps are not actual street level, as none of us are 15 feet tall. Believe it or not that 9/10 foot difference matters in perception when walking around.
I agree! I'll use the analogy of how one would feel in a natural canyon somewhere out west.
It may not feel as claustrophobic and asymmetrical as New York City (when I was there it's really hard to not just stare up the whole time lol) or even Boston. Washington DC is a more wide and symmetrical canyon set up. It may not feel like a canyon to some, fair enough (to me it still did, just a different feeling, more of a unified, spacious one) but it's definitely still considered a canyon.
Like I said, there are uniquely narrow, tall and really asymmetrical canyons, and more spaciously wide, not as tall, but symmetrical canyons and everything in between.
If posters looked at my comparisons to natural canyons you can't deny that the wide one isn't a canyon - just a DIFFERENT type of canyon. Just because it's not as narrow or having that claustrophobic effect doesn't make it less of a canyon by definition.
Last edited by CinderFella7; 04-22-2020 at 01:51 PM..
Not to start another debate, but DC has the office/hotel/residential downtown square footage of downtown Chicago even now. That's why the downtown core is 2-3 times the land area of cities like Philadelphia, San Fran, and Boston. If you can't build up like NYC and Chicago, the city had to build out to fit all the square footage with height limits.
Removing height restrictions historically in DC would have actually eliminated the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, Pentagon City-Crystal City corridor, downtown Bethesda, downtown Silver Spring, and Tyson's Corner development shifting that square footage into the city because there would be room to build it. The only reason edge cities formed in DC historically is because of height limits.
So you want DC to look like Roslyn or Tysons?
If DC were to lift height limits tomorrow, it would result in a bunch of giant glass slabs going up left and right, and probably result in the destruction of many fine low/mid rise buildings.
I'm not a fan of DC either way, but I will take the low-rise skyline over removing height limits.
If height limits were removed 100 years ago, the result might have been different due to more quality high-rise architecture.
That poster is a delusional Philly hater so it doesn't surprise me that he made his blatantly false and completely opposite from reality delusional statement. Notice how he literally is the only person in this thread to say otherwise. Philly is a top 5, or arguably top 3 US city for "urban canyons".
I don't know if that's all that reasonable for a metric. You can have 100 million square feet of office space in sprawling cities without urban canyons at all or have a downtown declared to be far larger than just two square miles. You can also make urban canyons with buildings that are used for more than just office space. What you're saying is pretty tangential to the idea of urban canyons, but does seem like a topic about which cities have the most office space though I'm sure that already exists.
Can someone dig out the most class A office space thread maybe with updates?
There are only 3 cities in American with more than 100 square million feet of office space. So what sprawling cities in the U.S. come close to that amount?
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