Flashbacks:
The RNGC Caddyshackpocalypse
Bollards!
Looking at this exciting scale model, you'd be forgiven for thinking you're looking at plans for the Shopping Bag building in Tysons Corner... except, wait. Trees. They don't do trees in Tysons. So where do they like trees and stuff? Oh, yeah -- Reston.
That's right -- this is a scale model of an earlier plan for Reston Town Center, which borrowed from the storied architectural traditions of "Fairfax County's downtown" by having overscaled buildings positioned too far away from each other and with too little relation to each other in an incoherent, car-focused cityscape, only with some junior architect deciding at the last minute to run out to Toys R Us to pick up some Playmobil trees to signify token respect for Reston's love of "open space." Nice!
We've seen an aerial perspective of this early model before, but it's only at the ground level that we can see how narrowly we missed building another Tysons Corner right in the middle of our earth-toned community. And as it's grown, Reston Town Center has certainly managed to look more organic and -- dare we say it? -- citylike than this ever would have, the end.
Don't give up hope, Restonian, we very well could build a Tysons right here in Reston!
ReplyDelete...and if the work of the Reston (blah-blah-blah) Task Force is any indication, we're headed down that track like it or not.
... and as RTC grown, not only has it become more citylike, it has also become more eyesorelike.
ReplyDeleteNo Growth is Smart Growth.
What could have been, will be.
ReplyDeleteThanks to "smart growth"--which means anything that just about anyone wants it to mean--we are heading for more density, and more of it just about everywhere, especially in Reston. Such has been the (fatally flawed and anti-suburban) intellectual bias of city planners for forty years now, and we are now in the happy confluence of circumstances that will finally let this come to pass almost everywhere, and not just in Reston or NoVA. Higher energy prices, crazy speculative real estate markets, and taxpayer-subsidized density thru expensive mass transit projects will soon have everyone living in their own private Clarendon or Tysons. You want your own private Idaho instead? Better move there while you can, 'cause we are running out of livable open space here! [Hint: three words you NEVER use in the Java Master's presence, grasshopper: "Smart growth" (and) "sustainable". All of these word represent the intellctual FRAUD that is being foistered on the public by wierdo environmentalists, the otherwise unproductive public employees known as planners, real estate developers who will build just about anything, anywhere all in the name of "market forces", and politicians greedy for contribuitions from said developers.
ReplyDeleteBythe way, a north-south route thru Loudoun County (the so-called second beltway)is okay with me. Witness the rehearsed, faux outrage of the anti-suburban growth crowd as it proceeds....
There's no way this rendering could be a vision of what Reston Town Center could have been. I mean, for God's sake, where are the leaning Hillbilly Village wooden 4-Way Stop sign posts in this illustration, you know, the ones that are currently in place at RTC?
ReplyDelete