Model Behavior

Downtown Sarasota has seen a number of very questionable developments. The current list includes giving away four stories of public space above the sidewalk at 1350 Main St, the give away of a portion of the public street (as well as the sidewalk) as part of the concession for 100 Central, the extremely narrow sidewalk abutting Fruitville in front of Marquee En Ville, and the poor design of the Whole Foods loading dock that forces trucks to drive up onto the sidewalk across Second St in order to back into the dock space.

Architectural drawings and renderings are apparently inadequate to prevent visualization of poor design. As we noted in a recent post, The Pelican Press quoted:

[Sarasota City Planner] Murphy countered, “We struggle with drawings. Developers want certainty. We could probably get a model out of them, but drawings, they’re not prepared to spend $350,000 to do that.” Board member Carl Meyer said he “feels the tail is wagging the dog. It’s a cost of doing business for developers. What we need is a process in this city so developers don’t run over our city."

Save Our Sarasota strongly recommends that our Planning Department require scale models of proposed major buildings in their downtown site to prevent future problems.

This is particularly important for the proposed Pineapple Square project. With no details presented, we hope problems like we have already seen are not repeated.

How proposed and current buildings fit together in our downtown space has not been addressed. We need to be able to see how downtown will be shaping up - this can only be done with the use of scale models of a size that can show interrelationships within the built environment.

We need an accurate model of our downtown that shows all the impacts of development.