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Thursday, August 20, 2009

Guilford's spaceship


Last week, while browsing the NY Times homepage during lunch, I glanced past one of those articles that are blurbed on the front page with just the headline and a small picture. "Hey," I thought, "that looks like that weird building we used to see when we went to the beach." It was that building, actually -- a 1980s condo building in my hometown of Guilford ("known for its almost-exaggeratedly adorable Colonial, Federal and Victorian houses") had made the Times.

I'm quite surprised that it ever got zoning approval -- Guilford is very conservative on that sort of thing -- but it is pretty cool. As a kid, I always thought it was an office building, and wondered why they had chosen a design that afforded them so little space for actual offices.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I thought it looked like a hot dog bun, and always wanted to see a giant hot dog in the middle.

lj said...

I'd enjoy a tour, or even just seeing a floorplan of the building. From the pictures I don't think I understand how it's put together, but it looks pretty neat.

It's interesting that the tenants of the building view it as a triumph that the builder managed to deny convention and the neighbors' sense of style and decorum, but they have a self-appointed "aesthetics police" who enforce conformity within the building to a different set of aesthetic rules. (The word "architected" makes me feel a little queasy.)