My attempt at blog contribution is to take notice of the unremarkable but highly trafficked areas of our city and produce a quick concept sketch that will hopefully show a way architecture can improve the location. So here is my first one, the location is found in Eastown on the corner of Giddings and Wealthy, which is currently home to a do-it-yourself car wash. Car washes are incredibly bad for the environment, our Grand River, and all else down stream. The other fault of this type of commercial application is that one business with only one employee is using all the potential space that three or four businesses could easily occupy and employ a handful of neighborhood denizens. There are many more nuances for first selecting this site (e.g. unsightliness, night crime, environmental concerns as I mentioned earlier, etc.), but I think the economic benefit is truly primary here the others are an amazing benefit to creating truly sustainable buildings.
Keep in mind this is just sketching for fun. This building is not the start of a real project in any shape or form, but just for fun I would love to hear some comments and thoughts on what businesses could occupy the building. It could be anything; the sky is the limit. Personally, I would like to see a Jack-of-All-Trades take the corner unit and a classy P.I. above! Also what could happen with the streetscape that will tie this idea to the westerly residences and the rest of the commercial corridor to the east? Could a similar building be mirrored across the street in the vacant lot? Don't forget that Grand Rapids doesn't have a parking problem; what we have is a walking problem, so next we should fill in the parking lot with a real building! Let's get our DENSITY ON!
