Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Daily Dose of Blairmont 111

  • 2808 Dodier Street (Babcock Resources LLC, October 2007)

May 2008

Here's a house that would actually be an ideal candidate for the kind of tear-it-down development that seems to be Blairmont's objective. It's a simple little building, with large vacant lots to the east and west; Blairmont already owns the latter. Remove one small, architecturally unremarkable house, and you've got a prime development site.

That, of course, is assuming you absolutely must insist on tearing something down. Alternatively, you could just build on either side of it, and leave the existing house alone, but that seems to be a pretty radical concept for most St. Louis developers.



It certainly does seem possible that a building might be able to squeeze onto this tiny vacant space. Oh, if only there was some precedent around to show how to build upon such a minuscule lot, some sort of existing building in the area that one could copy, some predecessor to show that building on this diminutive space might be possible! If only.

It is extremely unfortunate that Paul McKee seems to think the tear-'em-down concept works on a vastly larger scale, with occupied homes and businesses, with beautiful and significant works of architecture, with blocks that are more building than vacant land, with entire neighborhoods, with people as well as buildings.

No comments: