Imagination is a wonderful thing, as is democracy. However, the idea that crowd-sourcing design makes for excellence is fatally flawed — witness the camel (a horse created by committee).
St. Pete’s mayor and City Council are soliciting public input from every citizen over 18 years old on the eight design finalists for the new St. Pete Pier. Although the process was developed by a diverse group of stakeholders to be “fair, comprehensive and transparent,” it is doomed to disappoint. Seeking consensus on design leads inevitably to the blandest, least controversial option.
So what does the public get to weigh in on?
The existing pier, which culminates in the much-reviled yet puzzlingly beloved upside-down pyramid, is structurally unsound and requires removal, partially or completely. Options include replacing the pyramid with a similarly shaped building or an emphatically different shape. All of the designers seem to agree that the existing pier extends too far into the bay to be walkable, and the collective strategy is to create interim park and environmental space. Some proposals posit elaborate natural areas; others suggest broad sand beaches; others outline formal gardens with crisply clipped hedges. You can see them all in detail here.
Here’s my quick take on the eight:
Blue Pier (W Architecture and Landscape Architecture) is actually very green. It creates numerous “natural environments” for exploration — leafy lagoons, mangrove islands, a spa beach and dune walk. Nice, but incongruous in the center of an urban core.
Destination St. Pete Pier (St. Pete Design Group) offers a sand beach and ramps that curve around a pyramidal base. It feels like a hybrid of the more sensuous Lens (the proposal voted down in the last go-round in 2011) and the pyramid, which is plopped in the center.
Discover Bay Life (VOA) plants a silly, disproportionate and just plain ugly triangle atop the pyramid. The shade structures and marine discovery center are nothing special.
Prospect Pier (FR-EE with Civitas + Mesh) would tear down the existing pier and build a recreational area with a sand beach, a great lawn and no shade.
rePier (Ross Barney Architects) offers more fill, another pyramid with a vertical garden, a spa beach, and a walkway lined with uninspired small wooden kiosks and palms. Please spare us the clichéd graphic of fireworks bursting above the pier.
The Crescent (ahha!-New Quarter) proposal is a compendium of design-speak. The structure feels heavy and awkward.
The Pier Park (ASD/Rogers Partners/KSLA) is an ambitious, vast construction of erratic angular forms. Not lovely.
Alma (Alfonso Architects) is my personal favorite: a modernist romance of disciplined form framing nature. In the video presentation, seductive music plays as a yacht under full sail sweeps toward the elegant silhouette of a tower, all white walls, simple stairs and transparent railings, the randomly patterned lattice wall creating an intricate filigree of shadows. There’s a restaurant shaped like a coquina and two levels of piers, a lower one for fishing and boating and an upper level for strolling. Stylized gardens fan off from the primary connector between the restaurant, which hugs the docks, and the tower at the Pier’s end. The entire plan is very formal, consciously nodding to European models of successful public spaces which create a sense of procession.
But you know what? The original reason for a pier was to generate economic development in St. Pete, activate the urban core and bring people downtown. All that is already going on.
Wouldn’t 2015 be a better year if we drove a stake through this conversation once and for all?
So here’s my #1 proposal: Send write-in ballots to St. Pete elected officials asking for the one option not offered to the public in the evaluation process:
None of the above.
Let’s declare victory and spend that $45 million more wisely. Demolish the thing and use the remaining funds for projects that support the bustling, vibrant and beautiful waterfront that already exists.
Or, to to use a Yiddish expression: “Genug!” — roughly translated as an emphatic “Enough!”
This article appears in Dec 25-31, 2014.