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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rambi who wrote (65862)	11/25/2004 12:56:02 PM
From: Crocodile	Respond to of 71178

They were more practical on the hotel street. The posts go up and down. They can lower them for a car after they check the license plate. Yes, well, this is not the same situation. The barriers are those big things they use along highways to block off lanes during construction and they've been there for years and keep inching out further into the lanes creating traffic bottlenecks everywhere..and the sidewalks are all blocked off, etc.. It's all really pretty...uhm.. I'll try to be charitable.. but it's downright inconvenient considering this is the very heart of the city between all of our historic buildings, etc... As for the architecture of the Canadian US embassy, eek. Intrigued by your description, I googled a picture and you didn't exaggerate! And yes, actually, those photos don't even begin to give an impression of how it looks as you don't get the scale of the thing.. it's incredible. The first time I looked at it through the windows of the National Gallery, I coined the name, "Battlestar Galactica" and that is about as close as I can come to a description. As you know, I have a pretty extensive background in architecture and art history and am actually very open to all sort of designs -- and love cutting edge stuff as well as traditional, but this one is just one plain ugly sucker. However, I think the bigger problem to many is, and this is in conflict with that page about the building which says it was the "last available space" -- is that the embassy was actually offered several excellent locations in an area where most of the major embassies are located further away from the actual city core -- not far, but just not right in the middle of things. At the time, many (as it turns out, rather prescient) people in the security community up here were absolutely aghast at the implications of locating the building on this particlar site and were quite vocal in their opposition. However, some rather strenuous arm-twisting ensued, and eventually, the government relented and construction began. The rest is history. :-( croc