A typically insightful column this week from Whitney Gould in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, discussing sad developments in the Wisconsin resort area of Door County.
Fish Creek - I've been vacationing in Door County since I was a teenager. Even back then, when my parents weren't golfing at Peninsula State Park they were grousing about "too much development." (Translation: Mom-and-pop cabins being leveled for fancier motels.)
These days, the motels are giving way to condos; modest cottages are becoming teardowns; and meadows that once swayed with Queen Anne's lace are sprouting McMansions. I find myself sounding more and more like my parents, fretting that Door County's character - the breezy ambience born of those wide-open spaces and water views; the intimacy of those picturesque little villages - is being lost.
But it's not just the development that worries me. It's the ugliness of so much of it: the proliferation, in the unincorporated areas, of faceless metal storage sheds; the obliteration of scenic vistas; the squeezing of huge, poorly designed condos and generic-looking shopping strips into narrow sites; the overall lack of attention to proportion, scale and detail. Has the architecture profession gone AWOL up here?
"So much of what we're seeing was designed for cities," says Virge Temme, a Sturgeon Bay architect who shares my distress. "It's completely out of character for Door County."
Temme, to her credit, is trying to buck the trend. Her houses tend to be small and nicely proportioned and packed with earth-friendly features such as solar heating, recycled and salvaged materials, and rainwater collection systems.
But she has been approached by builders who want her to "design" massive new condos, when what they really mean is that she should rubber-stamp an already completed cookie-cutter design by non-architects - an illegal, unethical practice that she wants no part of.
"There is no real sense of style to much of this stuff," says Mark Walter, executive director of the Bay-Lake Regional Planning Commission. "It's just haphazard. And with property values increasing so fast" - shoreline parcels can bring up to $20,000 a linear foot - "people just don't understand how to say no when someone is waving $1 million in front of you for some new project."
Locals told me that the close-knit nature of the peninsula's villages, with their old-boy networks, makes things even trickier.
"It's tough to tell someone you know that your building looks ugly," says Bob Kufrin, village administrator in Sister Bay, which is becoming a haven for retirees.
Link: JS Online:Character assassination: Good design AWOL in Door County sprawl.
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