Really great thoughts – and well worth asking. I hope those on the Urban renewal authority are thinking through these aspects of our street life as well. Have you seen James Kunstler’s speech on the tragedy of suburbia?

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia.html

It’s well worth checking out and ties in, I think, to the discussion.

My two cents – cities worked great for thousands of years when people live, worked, and played in an area where everything was mixed together. It wasn’t until post war America that the traditional idea of cities were abandoned – we separated out all the pieces, grew out and not up through the Interstate highway system and overall built places that were antiseptic and not worth caring about. Robert Moses tried to do this to New York and succeeded in many ways (except for in Greenwich Village, of course). Anyway, I have high hopes for the Devon Tower, and how it ties into the Myriad and C2S.

Cheers,

Michael

Even in MidAmerica tower, which isn’t that great, Devon has kept the landscaping so beautiful that I feel their building has a great street presence walking by. There are always people using the benches and stuff out there too. The park will be a great gathering place, and even better with retail in the podium.

To provide vitality and activity at the street level you need four basic elements: buildings placed at the edge of the street with active uses at the ground floor, physical (entryways) and visual (transparency) access directly onto the sidewalk (not into the building or parking structure), on-street parking for convenient access to those uses, and a properly designed pedestrian zones with wide sidewalks and pedestrian oriented design elements (street trees, lights, furniture). These basic elements alone generate pedestrian activity at the street level. It also helps if the first floor architecture incorporates human scaled design.

No matter how exciting a project is for an area, if you do not pay attention to activity, uses, and design at the street level, you can effectively kill the excitement and vitality of an area, even on one block. We’ve all been to places in successful downtowns where one block can be filled with diners enjoying lunch at a street cafe and the next block is dead because the building does not respond to the street.

The Devon project will set the standard for renovations and new projects in downtown OKC and it is important that they introduce life at the street level rather than just providing for a beautiful repository of workers who drive into the building and never leave their car.