City to JUMP: Take a Flying Leap
Well it comes as no surprise that the City of Boise has resoundingly panned the hastily thrown together JUMP project. As the Statesman reports today:
In August, city officials and urban design experts brought in by Boise Mayor Dave Bieter met with Simplot planners to review the project proposal. The gist of that meeting was that the project should change, said Councilman Alan Shealy.
And that . . .
Some of the biggest concerns: that the project didn’t connect well to BoDo or other Downtown developments, and that its design wouldn’t be open enough to pedestrians. “I heard the experts didn’t pull any punches,” (P&Z Member Doug) Cooper said. “It was a fascinating project, but where it could be better is how it sits in the city in an urban way … being active for people on the street, it just doesn’t do very well.”
And of course you might recall what I said way back in May when the project was first proposed:
It remains to be seen what the site planners are thinking. A ringed fortress in the city’s cultural district? There is zero visibility between the buildings in the complex, that is a negative. The one good thing about that could be sound mitigation from traffic. We’ll see though what design review and the Council have to say.
Good for the powers that be for saying NO to bad design. There’s been a lot of that in this city through the urban renewal years, some by the Simplots already (Grove Hotel). A $100 million project in the heart of the city is something that has to be done right.
Development, Simplot | admin December 4, 2009
