Filling In: Fantasy Buildings Part 1

This article was scraped from Rochester Subway. This is a blog about Rochester history and urbanism has not been published since 2017. The current owners are now publishing link spam which made me want to preserve this history.. The original article was published May 31, 2016 and can be found here.

     By       Matthew Denker

Welcome back, readers, to a new, semi-regular Filling In feature - Fantasy Buildings. Fantasy Building, really, since each feature will look at just one imaginary building I've been thinking about (imagining?). I'll also share a few pictures of buildings that inspired the idea and maybe a few ideas of just where a building like this would work in Rochester.

Our first imaginary building is a 3 story, masonry and glass apartment building. The first floor could potentially be retail, or it could be setup as live work space. My rendering has no windows in the back, but depending on the site chosen for this building, windows could easily be added. Also, the building could be made as long, as deep, or as L-shaped as necessary.

The building was inspired by a building I saw in Stillwater, OK while I was there a few weeks ago. That building is only two stories, but otherwise is very similar.

I liked the idea of extending the internal form an additional floor in a combination of many new buildings in NYC as well as the reuse of historic facades in Washington DC. Here are a few examples of those.

I don't really have a vision for where this, or a building like it could go, although I think it'd look great over in NOTA on one of the surface lots over there. Possibly somewhere on West Main as well.

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Now here's your chance to critique the building (keep it PG for our younger readers, please) or suggest somewhere it might go. If you see something that catches your fancy, please feel free to take the design and run with it. I promise I won't come after you! I'm looking forward to sharing more fantasy buildings in the future. Until then.