We all need beauty-iful buildings in our lives

Sorry, that title is a little painful. But we do all need beauty and we know it when we see it. When it comes to planning, it's about helping to encourage beautiful buildings in the right locations, and discouraging buildings in other locations to preserve our beautiful open spaces. I am struck by how each of us has immediate reactions to building of different sizes, shapes, and designs, all based on the locations and the neighborhood context. What are your favorite buildings? Shoot me an email with a picture or name and location of some of your favorite structures. We also know what and why we don't like particular buildings. It's too big, the facade's too uniform, or the design unresponsive to the surrounding architecture and scale. I love the Royal Crescent in Bath, England, for example, because of its history, materials and human scale. I was also excited to be there on vacation having just survived driving our rental car from London on the left side of the highway (still unnerving); I felt welcome and warm. The same goes with public spaces, the width of our streets, and the relationships with our streets to our building heights.

Wakefield has a number of gateways into town and we'd benefit from having beautiful, well-designed public spaces, buildings, streets, and walkways to welcome folks to town and welcome us home. Unfortunately, our zoning bylaws appear a little out of date and may not fully help us plan for our future at the top of the Lake. The building at Harvard Mills is a good case in point: its height and massing tell me we need to reduce the maximum height of the industrial zone, add dimensional controls to create buffers especially at the edges, and encourage a stepped approach as stories are added. A Lake overlay make ssense but there are a lot of details, intersecting goals, including conservation, not to mention lots of property owners.

Conservation of our other open spaces, especially our water supply at Crystal Lake, is equally compelling. We'll do that largely through ensuring our zoning bylaws are up-to-date and help us plan for the future. We need to look comprehensively at our zoning bylaws, our zoning map, and our overlays. I'm reading our code, and I've got some ideas. Email me. Let's start a conversation. Let's go Wakefield!