Thursday, June 15, 2006

Where is the design outrage?

It has been several days since the Plain Dealer published an asinine proposal for the re-design of Public Square. Accept for a few vociferous protests from Blog on the City and Improvised Schema, the Cleveland blogosphere has been disturbingly quiet and rather unconcerned.

The relative silence from Northeast Ohio’s digitally enlightened again supports my perception of Cleveland as a lower-tier design city, incapable deciphering what constitutes good design and awful design. The lack of indignation further reinforces Steve Litt’s assessment of Cleveland’s design culture (see posts below).

4 comments:

Frank A. Mills said...

Perhaps we've just given up on Cleveland and environs. From my own personal experience a certain architect always seems to be the "enlightened one" even if his designs (1) suck and/or (2) are plagarized. If you've been to downtown Rocky River lately you'll see a fiasco in the making ... Detroit being paved as a road to move cars through rather than taking the opportunity to install traffic coming devices and appealing landscaping, and then there's Beachcliff, right indowntown RR, a suburban plaza with pretentions of Crocker Park. Hardly, especially with parking front & center. When I asked the Rocky Powers Powers, I was assured that this was the "Best."

As for me, I will do my work, thank you, in other cities that know good design, but most importlantly understand that the word "best," implies excellence, not merely, "the best that we could do, because we do not have one creative bone in us."

I could go on, but I'll shut up.

Stan said...

Unfortunately, Frank, the term "Best" around here usually translates into "what can we build for a relatively cheap price with little public interaction or design".

Good note, Doc. It's disturbing to see that more people didn't write anything else in the blogosphere or our prominent architecture writer for the PeeDee lacked the interest in writing a critique.

We just have to keep pushing forward with challenging the design mentality here in Cleveland otherwise it will never change for the better.

Anonymous said...

post some images... the online version of the paper doesn't show anything.

Anonymous said...

seems like this would make a good design problem for a studio or a bunch of disgruntled young architects... then send these alternate proposals in to illustrate that there are alternatives to the crap that is normally pushed...