Psychotic episode

The Comprehensive Planning process has overwhelmed us with its spirit of continual civic improvement, and in that vein we wish to point out some very, very low-hanging fruit: 

Change the city code so that the following can NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN. 

We are assuredly not the first, nor even the ten-thousand-and-first, to compare the 1970s to a psychotic episode.  But where pride of place -- so to speak -- is concerned, the development of this site (the State Employees Credit Union on St. Mary's Street) must surely take the cake for Worst Streetscape Interface In Raleigh History. 

What gives this building its je ne sais quoi? 

Is it the compressed-gas holding tank, screened in such an original fashion from the adjacent sidewalk by the circlet of prickly bushes?  ("An opaque vegetative buffer!" exclaimed the critics of the time -- "surely a solution never before conceived by the mind of Landscape Architecture!")  But Modernism is nothing if not innovative.

Is it the semi-subterranean automated doors on the parking-garage vomitoria, which risk the lives of pedestrians at not just one, but even a generous two, junctions with the sidewalk? 

Is it the malign apertures in the Death-Star pillbox of a parking deck that forms the structure's principal streetwall, whether to enable the launching of Phlogiston Bolts By Lockheed-Martin (TM) or simply to facilitate the entry and exit of the personal flying commutercraft of the future?

Is it the pinkish-orange cast of the sodium-vapor illumination in the Vehicular Storage Basement, which, in the nighttime, casts outward through the rectangular gun-ports a baleful and corrupted light, shedding doom and disorder on its surroundings -- a lantern of darkness -- a modernist inversion of medieval stained glass -- spreading spiritual desolation, as if the entire construction were an inside-out York Minster? 

And yet these features do not fully exhaust the potential of the site to shock and dismay.  Indeed, horrified reader, there is more!   

We have yet examined only one-half of one side of this triple-frontage lot.

Stay tuned, if you dare, for the rest.

Comments

[Jason Sullivan]

I hate this building so much. Maybe it was designed for rougher neighborhood? Could that explain it's fortress-like exterior.

[RaleighRob]

Yeah I'm not a big fan of this either. The front on Hillsborough Street is a little better....but not much. (They moved the entrance to the branch to a side door away from the front...how dumb!)

Although frankly if I could change ONE thing about this building, I'd turn down the volume on the "Beep Beep" of the drive-up ATM machine. You can hear it loud and clear in most of the apartments next door!