WASHINGTON — How many mediocre buildings can one city absorb?
The key point is that the design began with a physical, on-the-spot creative process: human eyes and human hands teasing out the visual and spatial possibilities of a dynamic architectural engagement with this fag-end sliver of central London – the kind of urban junkspace where most developers would whack up mediocre buildings designed by jobsworth architects.
"Please do not diminish the memory of all of the people who died there by building 50-, 60-, or 70-story mediocre buildings on the site," said Jonathan Hakala, a Hoboken, N.J., resident who worked on the 77th floor of 1 World Trade Center, at a public hearing sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
"I fought for the importance of the Republic of Austria supporting radical architecture, not some mediocre office building," he recalled.
Indeed, after several years of building mediocre Web sites that were little more than digitized snapshots of standing collections, the museum world is busy erecting sites that are compelling to visit, and filled with virtual tours and extensive education.
As the GM of FOX.com and then the head of original programming at AOL I have been responsible for the production of terabytes of original web videos — some good, a great many mediocre, but none building repeat audience).
Much of this new building is mediocre, with public buildings often emphasising giganticism and grandeur rather than style.
"It's actually something that we've part built about three times before this, so for me I've always been looking for something that I felt was a compelling enough entry point because building a mediocre product, particularly after we had such great traction on Android, would just have been so disappointing to have something that wasn't great.
Irresponsible buildings of mediocre, flashy, undistinguished designs have scarred the city with glass spikes and warped monstrosities.
The view from Tate Modern towards St Paul's is of a group of buildings so mediocre as to be incompatible with the admiration we profess for Christopher Wren.
