I will say it again: Charlotte is becoming a pretty f**king cool city, and in recent years they have fixed or at least remedied a lot of the issues that plagued it for decades:
started a light-rail public transit system that has since been expanded and continues to expand
converted TONS of ground floor/street level parking deck space to retail space
has added an INSANE amount of housing, and continues to, most of which also includes ground floor retail space
grocery stores in the immediate downtown area (Whole Foods I know for one)
all while continuing to attract some PRETTY DAMN DECENT architecture in their tallest buildings
Charlotte, for all the clowning it gets, does kinda “got a lot”
I agree, I love a lot about Charlotte, but prefer the Raleigh vibe personally. But the “nicer architecture” is directly attributed to all the banking and “look at me” culture of the finance industry. I would like nicer buildings here, but the banking industry in Raleigh is nothing compared to Charlotte.
I will say it again: Charlotte is becoming a pretty f**king cool city, and in recent years they have fixed or at least remedied a lot of the issues that plagued it for decades:
It’s improving rapidly and has things that I envy but a LOT more is needed until I could call it cool.
Couple new angles of one of the latest apartments to break ground in the Optimist Park area. South End of course gets most of the buzz with its taller buildings, but the area between Uptown and NoDa is filling in so fast that it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on. This is called Oxbow and is being developed by Space Craft who built one of the first car-free apartment buildings in Charlotte just around the corner. 7 stories and just under 400 apartments with almost 12k sf of retail. I believe the two buildings will be bisected by a new alignment for the Little Sugar Creek greenway which currently briefly runs alongside N Davidson St in that area. The light rail station is also about a block away from here.
I have never been the biggest fan of visiting Charlotte, but the last two times I’ve been - I’ve checked out both Optimist Park and Plaza Midwood. Very different vibes, but really enjoyed both of those areas. Would much rather stay in either of those than South End or Uptown.
These buildings are just so much cleaner than what we get in Raleigh. For whatever reason our builders here love to throw a mish mosh of textures & colors onto a wall. I love the simplicity of these builds, it looks sleek.
You’ve got the brick wall, black flutted accents, a black wall, a white wall, wood accents at the corner, white walls, our favorite seafoam green accent wall, multiple styled windows. It’s just too much going on.
Stick with black walls, brick walls, one style of window, and the black flutted accents. And this building would look a lot cleaner in my mind.
To keep things in perspective, for every development we get from Space Craft (which leans towards clean and simple designs) we get a bunch of these…which look kind of cool in renderings but a lot worse in reality.
@Deekay93 I’m sure someone on this board would know for sure but I wonder if Raleigh has design guidelines that push developers towards so many textures and colors. I’ve heard that, as larger apartment buildings became more common, many cities began requiring more design variation in new developments to “break up the monotony”. The problem of course is that it ends up looking like a mess with such a mishmash of colors and textures. Personally I’ve always been of the opinion that cleaner and more traditional designs are best because they typically age much better than trendy designs (applies to cars and a number of other things as well).
It honestly looks like they took two buildings and just stuck them together. In no world do they actually fit together. Brick warehouse meets Aluminum trailer.
