Downtown's New Buildings

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“I’m comfortable with the scale,” says Quinn, “and although the articulation could have been stronger, the building does have base, middle, and top. Dealing with the rather steep change of grade on Huron was a challenge, a challenge not everyone would say they met. Plus while the facade has a kind of precast, Tinkertoy quality to it, we have to remember precast concrete can be a very viable and useful tool.”

“That building is a condo,” sums up Strickland from his Park Avenue office in New York, where he’s spending his sabbatical, “so the move was to make the building more stylized, to use the precast concrete panel system in a way that says, ‘I’m expensive. Live here.’”

A popular office and a debatable City Hall addition

Amid all the condos and apartments, new office buildings have been scarce lately. But one office building all the architects like is 201 Depot, the sleek white office on stilts just down the street from Casey’s Tavern. “I have to give it to [developer Bill] Martin for being a little adventurous,” concedes Luckenbach. “And I admire the gesture of putting a railroad car on tracks in front of the building.”