Your ideas about our future as a region are just as important as anyone else’s, and together we can inspire, educate and mobilize this community to create a better place for us all to live, work and play.
Using the “Leave a Response” box below, please share your thoughts on the following:
- What is your vision for your community in 2020?
- What do you like best about the Pikes Peak region?
- Describe a moment when you felt the best connection to your community.
Click here to read what others in our Colorado Springs community are saying.
My nomination for an existing piece of architecture that represents the city is the Pioneers Museum. Built originally as the country courthouse, the 100 year old facility captures the wealth of the gold rush era in the expense of the building and the quality of the people in its design.
Regarding a vision for 2020, it would be a city with less billboard blight. Rather than one building, it would be the reduction in the current level of about 190 billboards in the city and 64 in the county. Billboards are litter on a stick and the new electronic billboards are Powerpoint on a Pole. Billboards represent blight in neighborhood and commercial districts, just as much as properties littered with junk vehicles or yards overgrown with weeds.
Citizens in general are aesthetically minded as evidenced by well maintained lawns, beautiful flower gardens and attractive homes inside and out. Businesses also in general pay attention to building appearances by regular cleaning, painting, and landscaping. So billboards are incongruous when allowed by city and county zoning officials and elected officials to detract from adjacent property values and scenic vistas, when all around them citizens and businesses try to make their properties look nice. Even governments try to make public properties look nice with flowers in medians, attractive designs on highway bridges, and artistic highway sound barriers. Thus, the fewer the billboards in 2020, the more attractive and scenic will be our community.
I think that downtown really needs to move away from any car traffic and turn into a walking mall. The switch to two directions of traffic on Tejon didn’t do much to bring more people downtown in my humble opinion. How about looking at Pearl Street in Boulder and 16th Street mall in Denver as examples? Further, adding affordable housing in mixed-use developments downtown, condensing the urban core, and moving away from sprawl (a la Portland, Oregon) would really change this city for the better.
Colorado springs will become a much more sustainable city. Downtown will become the focal point it should be. After all, a strong urban core is essential to any relevant city. This core will be connected to other areas of town through the use of green roads… essentially linear parks consisting of paths for hiking and biking. In addition to these green roads, mass transportation will allow connection of neighborhoods, and to the metro areas to the north (i.e. Denver, Boulder, Ft. Collins, etc). The Springs will therefore become less auto dependent and will act as an example of sustainable development for the 21st century.
Citizens will decide that the typical suburban buildings currently littering every corner of the built environment take away from the beauty of the city and only make our streets look like every other city in the country. Well-designed, sustainable, Modern, 21st century buildings will alter the city into the built environment the scenery deserves, finally giving Colorado Springs a unique city to match its unique landscape.
Will these things happen? Hopefully… an architect in training can hope.
Larry Barrett’s comment is sadly indicative of the state of thinking about architecture in this city. People use 100 year old thinking. There is no imagination for a new architecture. The residents want to be comfortable in reproductions of tuscan villas. Thank heaven for the Cornerstone Arts Center and kudos to CC for completing this boundary pushing (in Colorado springs anyway) structure.