Gross Symphony House
Good god is the new Symphony House condo building an ugly piece of shit. First off, I'm pissed off at it for blocking my view, from South St, of the most gorgeous building in all of Philadelphia, the Drake. Secondly, this thing is just plain fugly.
The cheapo siding they've decided to put on is the large-scale building equivalent of some shit aluminum siding that you bought half price because it wasn't moving off the showroom floor and you wanted to cut costs somewhere. Yuck. That faux-brick shit ain't fooling nobody. And speaking of fake brick, the new dorms over by UPenn at Chestnut/35 have some nasty ass crap too. Dis-gus-ting.
These condos are going for a bajillion dollars, eh? Why skimp on the siding? Why have cheap siding to begin with? This is Philly – go buy some god damn bricks! It's obvious they're trying to keep the brick look which dominates the entire city, why not get the real thing. I'm sure the people paying a bajillion dollars could cough up 1% more to cover the costs of the brick and labor – why didn't those job-haulting, pissy-fit, temper tantrum throwing unions put a stop to this place? They halted the Comcast Center's construction until the plumbers were allowed to install a secondary set of pipes – which if I recall correctly are NOT actually connected to anything – because they felt the money-saving "waterless" urinals were going to put people out of work.
I hate this thing.
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January 29th, 2007 @ 2:07 pm
yeah, I feel the same way about that siding (at both sites, although the Penn thing is more funky and uniformly artificial in surfaces, so that the "brick" just becomes a pinkish variant on the rest). I wonder whether it slipped by the reviewers; I know there's one building with fake brick in Wash West (the one that replaced the burned building around 10th with Wok & Tofu) and now the Civic Association makes that an explicit question to all developers — insisting that they use real materials or at least make explicit their intentions. but why on earth anybody would think they could sell "classy classy" with second-rate materials right up front is beyond me…
bitey bite! (grrrr)
January 29th, 2007 @ 6:49 pm
I can't agree more. Of all the condo projects, this (with the exception of that boat shaped monstrosity down on the Delaware) is the tackiest. What an ugly building. At least the Murano on Market or the planned tower at 24th and Walnut are damn fine peices of architecture. This thing looks like it will fall apart in a strong breeze.
I bet the walls in those overpriced units are thin as paper.
January 31st, 2007 @ 9:03 pm
Amen to all that.