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The Columbus Dispatch wrote
Third courthouse might have charm
County officials want a distinctive complex
Wednesday, March 28, 2007 10:09 AM
By Debbie Gebolys
A new Franklin County courthouse should look like a courthouse, planners and officials say. In Columbus, the puzzle of buildings surrounding Mound and High streets has none of that street presence. The buildings look more like office towers than the county’s administrative center.
But Franklin County will join its Ohio brethren with a $111 million courthouse complex. Construction might not be complete until 2010, but when it is, the county will have its own courthouse square at Mound and High, and a courthouse that will be easily identifiable.
Perhaps most identifiable will be a new courthouse square, on three of the four corners Main and High streets. Equal stretches of landscaped open spaces are to face one another on the northwest, southwest and southeast corners.
Comments
- Rmoiii: Where are the photo's of the current construction going on in the short nor
- cheap: i highly recommend the Millersport sweet corn festival of course,the cor
- Jimmy Mak: Thanks for the write-up! Just to clarify - this is the third year we've do
- Briana Henry: Well, eventually they plan to add more bands from the region...gotta start
- bucki12: I like the business model, but the internet sales part seems like something
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Third Courthouse Might Have Charm
By: Walker
Related Posts:
Well one thing is certain, it can’t look worse.
The current one does look kind of dark and imposing, doesn’t it? I actually thought it looks like the lifeless, sterile skyscrapers of The Matrix … only without any special lighting effects needed.
I didn’t know that the new courthouse was slated to have a more traditional (I won’t say ostentatious …) feel; after all, wasn’t this project actually also supposed to have some mixed-use elements to it? If this is just a short structure no different than City Hall, only smaller, then $111 million suddenly starts looking like a prodigious price tag. If they want something big enough to last the county 100 years, as they say, they’re going to need to go vertical to at least some degree. Maybe not so high as the current municipal building, but not so low as City Hall, either.
I’m glad to see that the plans also call for getting rid of the decrepit gas station and other blighted industrial buildings at the northwest corner of Front & Mound, however, just south of the old Red Zone (what is that place now, anyway?), and turning it into stacked parking. Much better use of both spaces … getting rid of four surface lots for the courthouse and getting rid of some definite urban waste for the parking garage. That corner wasn’t going to be useful for much else, anyway, being right across the street from the juvenile detention center.
It was mentioned a little over a year ago that the developer was pushing for mixed-use, so hopefully that will still make it into the final plans.
That’s because it is dark and imposing.
The 20 foot concrete wall/wind tunnel on Front st. doesn’t help either. Throw in the multiple skywalks and you’ve pretty much got a case study in bad urban design.
The architects on this project have a good portfolio and focus on green buildings, so I’m expecting good things.
Is the current Franklin County Courthouse the tall, pointed black building that has an excellent lighting job or the smaller, grayish/whiteish building? I always get them confused and end up telling people from out of town that our county courthouse is the tall, black one. Does anyone know where our courthouse ranks in height? I read somewhere that is the second tallest county courthouse/building in the country.
The whole cluster of buildings there are courthouse buildings. Across the street (where the skywalk leads to) is the Annex (and a parking garage).
I’m not sure about the rankings though…
Skywalks kill sidewalks. This city still doesn’t get it, they should prevent such things from being built, ideally that is.
Why do skywalks kill sidewalks? I would think we’d want even more skywalks, particularly connecting public buildings. Much better than making people cross streets, disrupt traffic, etc.–or get caught in rain. I wouldn’t mind being able to walk from Nationwide’s HQ to the Statehouse without ever being forced to street level.
I *think* the issue is that skywalks bypass any retail installations which may be at street level in mixed use buildings – folks are going straight from a parking garage to the place they need to be, without getting a shot at the retail perhaps?
There’s also an aesthetic issue as skywalks will darken street level and create more of a tunnel effect, hurting sight-lines.
I get a kick out of it b/c it’s one of those cyclical things – it used to be that we wanted skywalks all over the place – the more the better, since soaring buildings all interconnected at upper levels were part of the vision of the future at the time.
The tall black/gray building houses some County offices, ie Auditor’s, Commissioners’ offices etc.
There’s also an aesthetic issue as skywalks will darken street level and create more of a tunnel effect, hurting sight-lines.
That’s definitely part of it. With a skywalk, not only do you create a dark cave-like area on the street, but you take away any chance of street-level “vibrancy”. The appearance of people outside walking around is a powerful indicator that its an exciting place to be.
The last few times I was in NYC I didn’t see one skywalk. We’ve got no less than 10 in our (much smaller) city.
Having has business in Minneapolis not long ago, it’s crazy how skywalk crazy that city is. But I guess when wind chills are in the negative 20′s or worse, they come in real handy. It was erie though at lunch in a big downtown there is NO ONE on the streets. The city looks literally deserted.
I agree. I couldn’t imagine what the Arena District would look like if the parking garages were connected to the Arena and Office Buildings via skywalks. Take all of those people off the street and put them up in the air in a tunnel where no one could see them and the place would look much less exciting during events and whatnot.
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I get a kick out of it b/c it’s one of those cyclical things – it used to be that we wanted skywalks all over the place – the more the better, since soaring buildings all interconnected at upper levels were part of the vision of the future at the time.
I can see that. I certainly don’t want people to bypass retail. (No developer should want that, either, since retail outlets are going to keep a sharp eye on things like that and won’t pay as much for retail square footage in an area from which foot traffic is being directed away.) However, I think the classical “skywalk city” vision, of which I admit I’m still one of those old fogeys (maybe I’m just holding onto a fad too long, but I still think they make a great deal of sense), is that larger buildings would have first *and* second floor retail, which in fact many of our downtown buildings do. LeVeque Tower. Huntington Center (albeit not as much as it could because it opted for a spacious, airy atrium, which I can understand).
It’s an interesting thought, that you could be walking along what is essentially one big indoor mall on the 2nd/3rd floor of every building, connected by skywalks, to get where you wanted to go…
But if you do that, that really leaves the question of what happens on the first floor, outside? Does the city become something like out of the movies where the lower levels are just abandoned/low-rent/slums while the upper stories of the SAME building might be thriving?
Heh. If the skywalks were at the level of the 40th or 80th floor of endless supercities of skyscrapers, that might be a possibility. However, two things here are utterly beyond dispute:
(1) The distance from the second floor to the first is minimal, and can be integrated with open floorplans as is done in essentially every multi-level shopping mall and many office towers now.
(2) Judge Dredd was a terrible[i] movie. :evil:
(1) The distance from the second floor to the first is minimal, and can be integrated with open floorplans as is done in essentially every multi-level shopping mall and many office towers now.
Yes, the actual Point A to Point B distance between two floors is minimal…and yes, in stairs, we currently have the technology to link the two. ;)
However the perception of having people walking around on the street vs. having people sheltered in skywalks is night and day. Go to NYC, or any European city for that matter. They just have a different feel to them, like they’re more alive. They encourage pedestrian interaction without trying to protect them from the “harsh” streets.
Here’s another one to consider…how would you feel if the Hampton Inn wanted to connect itself to the Convention Center (across the street) with a skywalk? Or how would you feel if an underground network of tunnels could link the galleries and restaurants in the Short North? They sure would keep people dry, and there might be fewer pedestrian/car accidents, but it wouldn’t do much for the vibrancy of the Short North.
Also don’t forget the role that busy sidewalks have in making cities safer. Police can’t be everywhere.
No but they sure can be total dicks when they are around.