an addition like could work in a place like Manhattan or Tokyo where architecture is constantly evolving, but in this scene it is completely insensitive… to the point of being aggressive.

indeed, modernist architectural “objects” are most successful in a landscape/rural setting (just look at most of the beautiful buildings on this website), not in an historic urban context. please Mr Architect, show some restraint!

What I like about Townhouse is that it is still part of the rhythm of the street filled with very different buildings–in size/height/shape/color–and that juxtaposition is what gives a project freedom. I very much believe that the architects are responding to their neighbors in a respectful manner–but they push the conversation forward, taking the best parts of the existing street (a sense of openess, the clean lines, a noble material in the stucco) and reinterpret them.

Nostalgia is not useful. A city is an evolving being with multiple perspectives. Architecture should reflect that.

There is absolutely nothing wrong in a cube or for that matter a sphere or even a frozen free flowing form.

The openness or closure are again matters of the “thinking of the day” (spirit of the time – zeitgeist)

builidngs of different ideologies and different periods can co-exist in any given neighbourhood.

It could have been a glass and steel building to stretch matters, thus certainly could be a white cube…. but certainly should have been one that factually responds to and co-exists in this environment.

How can one be so mindless of ones environment, especially when there is so much to respond to in the immediate neighbourhood.

Even the architecture of pluralism of which I am a proponent would not accept such an intervention.

This does not mean that one has to replicate the language of the dated vernacular architecture that surrounds the building. But, certainly responses to this in the chosen language is clearly lacking.

This is certainly one building that should not have been built where it is built.

and this new contemporist is not too comfortable!

If it were the Oscars it would win Best Supporting Actor.

Note that the adjacent buildings’ windows have no dressing: they are open to the street and because the houses are so shallow the gardens can often be seen straight through. This building is opaque, private, almost afraid. The garden wall in the back is brutally tall, bisecting what is otherwise an open, neighborly backyard community.

“The openness to all directions”! Really? THERE ARE NO GROUND FLOOR WINDOWS. Just by saying it’s not a fortress doesn’t make it any less of a fortress.

GReat!