Bad Designs

Here is a list of designs that I feel are bad. What qualifies as a bad design to me is something that is ineffective or inefficient. Some of these products just simply irritate me.

1. Buffalo City/Western New York Planning. I am born in raised in the Buffalo area, and it really irks me to see the city in such disarray. The city suffers from a massive brain drain and a regression population and economy. I would love to see Buffalo return to it's glory days. I feel that some of the city planning done to this city doomed it, as soon as they went into development. I see three major flaws with the planning of Buffalo:

   1. Placing the University at Buffalo's main campus in a suburb (and a swamp). The City of Buffalo and the University at Buffalo made a choice to not place their expansion campus in the city and placed it instead in the lovely town of Amherst, which was a giant swamp land. Some say this was done because of political friendships between Amherst and the planning committee. A university like ours should be placed in a city to not only spur economic development around the campus, but to entice students to come to the city to see what the city is all about in terms of culture and history. It is an extremely isolated campus and inherently a large commuter campus. A potential solution to this problem is to deal with what we have currently in terms of placement, and better interconnect the campuses to each other, and to down town. This can only be done with some form of rail system that could travel between campuses. This would allow students to experience downtown Buffalo, and potentially spend their money there, as well as allowing people the option of easily commuting from the city.

   2. Placing the Buffalo Bill's stadium in a suburb 40 minutes from anything in Buffalo. Another bad decision that could perhaps be blamed on bad political management, was to place a huge revenue generator such as a football stadium so far from the actual city. Granted that there is a great ability to tailgate around the stadium, due to so much open space, the stadium would do the city better if it was downtown. Having a stadium downtown would require a revamping of the highway infrastructure to allow the city to cope with the extra traffic, and that is something that would lead to a better transportation system in Buffalo. Along with having a stadium downtown, you would have a huge tax revenue generator, and economic development, as there are plenty of businesses that could thrive off events hosted in a stadium, such as bars and restaurants. I would propose to place the stadium downtown near the waterfront, where the Aud used to be.

   3. Lack of waterfront development. If you take a drive down the 190 from Buffalo to Niagara Falls, you will find industrial-zoned areas, that maybe at one point were necessary when water was the main form of transportation. However, in today's world, some of the most valuable land in areas is waterfront areas. These areas should be transformed to allow for businesses and residents to set up shop and live on to help develop the area. Even in the city, there should be a huge emphasis on luring businesses to set up shop downtown near the waterfront, as it is a valuable asset to have for a city.

2. Glass Atrium of New Engineering Building - Now, I have not been inside the building yet to see this atrium, but it looks like it has shrunk in size as compared to the proposed drawings. I feel like the main point of having a glass atrium was to have that large open space that students could gather in. I feel that the cost of increasing this is very marginal, seeing all you would need to do is extend the structure out a little more, and make your original design effective of creating that open space.

3. Capen Library - The color scheme of this library quite literally looks like it came directly from the 1970's and isn't pleasant to be in for long periods of time. The library should get an interior face lift to become more modern, and make it a place where students actually want to come and study. This library also lacks outlets in the basement floor, which is very counter productive to a student that needs to power a laptop for extended periods of time. I would recommend renovating the entire basement floor to make it more study-friendly.

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