When you see drawings for proposed architectural projects, they show an idealized vision with pleasant environs consisting of wide, neatly landscaped streets and pedestrians and dogs walking among minimal traffic. My eye was drawn in today’s local newspaper, the Plain Dealer, to an article about a new condominium project on a street that is very close to the university I used to work at and so I am familiar with the neighborhood.
But there was one thing that jumped out at me. Notice what looks like a river flowing from the center-right end of the drawing to the top left, with a series of bridges crossing it? Well, the bridges are there but there is no such river. What that land actually contains are railroad tracks at below street level.
I can imagine that when it comes to marketing the condos, the developer would find it far easier to sell them with a picturesque river and waterfront walkways as a backdrop instead of grungy railways. But unless they are planning to flood that area and create a new artificial river, this image is so unrealistic as to be laughable.
That French-flag theme playground is also a nice (& hard-to-believe) touch.
Marketing is an inherently immoral profession since it depends on making things look better than the marketer knows them to be.
I suspect that in a city with a hot condo market such as Toronto that image would be considered the equivalent of refrigerator art.
Mano,
The art appears to have been yanked from the article.
Did you perhaps do a screen grab?
Jeff
We have a couple of places in Portland where there are bridges over another street -- sometimes that is due to geography, but in at least one instance it is due to history -- where the street the bridge is over was once a local rail line, long since abandoned and turned into a road.
Jeff,
I did do a screen grab but you can see the image in the linked article. For some reason, they have not put it in the body of the article but in the photo montage that can be seen by clicking the image at the top.
That’s just a subtle acknowledgement of climate change and rising sea levels!