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comment by goobster
goobster  ·  1595 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Creeping Plague Of Ghastly Facadism

These pictures are exactly what happened to the Rainier Cold Storage building in Georgetown. I was a part of the Community Outreach project, when Sabey bought the building and was trying to get plans approved for it.

Turns out the building was built fast and cheap just before the turn of the century as a cold storage facility for Rainier Beer... and when you build fast and cheap by the lowest bidder, they use shitty bricks and grout. So the building falls apart, and the grout covers the sidewalk like beach sand, and you can scrape it out with the tip of your finger...

.... but the anti-development people have placed an inestimable VALUE on this iconic brick wall, and EVERY attempt by Sabey to do justice to the building, the history, and the neighborhood was shut down by fuckwits who don't understand the value is in the LOOK, not in the BRICKS.

So, instead of a gorgeous modern brick building with the flair and style of the old Rainier building, they had to reinforce and renovate a single wall made of shitty bricks and grout... which ate up so much budget that the REST of the building looks like it was puked out by an intern who never got past International Style design in their Architecture 101 class.

I talked with the Sabey guys, and they could have knocked down the original wall and rebuilt it - properly, with good bricks and grout - for 1/50th of what they paid to shore up the shitty wall. And that ate their entire design budget.

So now historic old Georgetown has what you see in the link above: a modern concrete shitbox with a brick wall grafted onto it. (Pan left to see what Georgetown USED to look like, before the "Historical Preservation Society" got involved in architectural decisions.)