Downtown's New Buildings

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“That building has two big problems,” says Luckenbach in his light-filled second-story office across from the Federal Building. “The windows on the upper floors are too small, and the windows on the main floor are too dark. On the other hand, this relative degree of self-effacement suits the building’s use. With students and a saloon as the tenants, we’d probably rather have it fade into the background.”

“It suffers from a lack of proportion between the parts and the whole,” says Marc Rueter in his garden-level office on Fifth Street around the corner from Jefferson Market. “Classical twentieth-century modernism says a building ought to have a bottom, a middle, and a top. But with Corner House Lofts what you have is a squashed bottom, a banal middle, and a timid top.” (Like the other architects, Rueter still refers to the building by the name it went by when the city planners reviewed it.)

Speaking from behind dark-tinted glasses, Bob Beckley declares, “It’s ugly—and there’s so much more they could have done to make it attractive. Balconies would have been nice. But instead it’s just ugly.

“However,” continues Beckley, sipping a latte in Sweetwaters, “there’s a place for ugly buildings, for background buildings, for banal buildings in the urban landscape, and I suspect that in time Corner House Lofts will disappear from sight.”