Design monstrosities (mixed use), Washington Nationals baseball stadium (updated with corrected image attribution)

Design monstrosities (mixed use), Washington Nationals baseball stadium
Originally uploaded by rllayman.

(Image courtesty of Jacqueline Dupree and her Near Southeast DC Development blog, from the section on theWashington Nationals stadium . Renderings on JDLand come from the DC Sports and Entertainment Commission and filings with the Zoning Commission. )

All the charm of urban renewal if you ask me.

Here's what Tom Boswell, sports columnist for the Washington Post, wrote a few weeks ago in the column "A Host of Problems at New-Look RFK":

Here's one version of the future which, if you put your ear to the ground, you can hear approaching like an elephant stampede.

First, developers, including the Lerners, will do what they do best: build 13-story multi-use profit centers that completely surround the new park, leaving few if any "vistas" for views of the Capitol or the Anacostia River. The next PNC Park? Forget it. The new ballpark will have all the sense-of-place of deluxe but disconnected Turner Field in Atlanta: Little or none...
Urban rewewal in Southwest DC. Photo by Dan Malouff, BeyondDC.

There was a review of Zaha Hadid's work a couple weeks ago, and it made the comment that modernism looks best from the air, at high speeds. It's a comment relevant to this design too.

But people aren't airplanes and we walk about 4 mph...

SBC Park, San Francisco, San Francisco Chronicle photo.

Wrigley Field, Chicago (photographer unknown).

Index Keywords: urban-design-placemaking; stadiums-arenas; mixed-use