Another dead project

[Ross Macintosh]

The image here is a thumbnail link to a bigger version of the illustration.



I designed the condo housing project a few years ago and it has been held up by a zoning dispute ever since. I just learned yesterday that our provincial Supreme Court has overthrown my client's development agreement with the the elected town council who had approved the project. It is very discouraging
[img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_frown.gif[/img] but I did get to have fun rendering the project with xara - and I was paid.

Regards, Ross
PS. In the time the project was on hold, the structural engineer died

[img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_frown.gif[/img]

<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>

[This message was edited by Mike Bailey on August 24, 2000 at 04:03 AM.]

[Mike Bailey]

I fixed the links for you. Hope ya don't mind?

Mb

[Ross Macintosh]

Although off-topic, in that it isn't a discussion of xara, this message is in response to Athena and is perhaps of interest to others:

The waterfront project I illustrated had a very slow and painful death. The developer who came to my architectural firm is a very interesting fellow. He is approaching full retirement and was looking to develop a condo project where he and a few good friends could live. He'd develop it and sell units to a few buddies and they'd all live happily ever after. Of course he'd sell some other units - so he'd get his for "free". The land in question is a piece of old landfill at one edge of a very attractive town. It had no trees. It was really just a unpaved parking lot that afforded some great waterfront views to the cars that illegally parked there and to the three houses across the street.

The land is zoned "waterfront industrial". Under this zoning it could be a junk yard, a garbage recycling operation, or (if it were big enough) an oil refinery or paper mill. The town's planner advised the town council that the proposed condo development conformed to the zoning. He did so with the thought that "waterfront industrial" is probably the most wide open of zones. To put it simply, if by right you can accept a polluting pulp mill then there should be nothing stopping you from building a relatively modest high-end housing development.

The town was not a pushover. Our developer didn't give up. We had 14 public presentations before council and its planning advisory committee. The project was redesigned three times in effort to win their approval. The design I posted above was actually the first one. What was finally approved after about one year of negotiations with the town is actually very different from the illustration. I should also point out that we presented the final scheme to the town's heritage group who advise council and we received their unanimous endorsement.

After we had the town's offical "notice of intention to enter into a development agreement" there is in our municipal law an opportunity for upset citizens to appeal. Four people got together and appealed on the basis that condos shouldn't be built on waterfront industrial land. The appeal was made to a gov't appointed board charged to see that municipal councils act democratically and that they apply laws correctly. This appeals process took several months and cost both the citizens group and the town a lot of legal fees. The council had to defend its actions to the board. Our client also had significant legal costs in his efforts to assist the town with its case. Eventually the review board agreed with the town council in support of the development. We thought we would proceed to construction.

It wasn't to be! The citizens group (all four of them) appealed the board's ruling to the provincial supreme court saying both coucil and the review board were in error. After several more months and more legal costs, three (appointed) judges of the supreme court agreed with the citizens group and ended all chance of the project ever being built. Their decision cannot be appealed.

I must say although the lawyers made a pile of money in this matter, it never really came down to one side having better lawyers or a "dream team". I find it interesting that the town's lawyer who originally advised the town on the legality of the planner's interpretation of the zoning - is now our province's Minister of Justice! In the time all of this has happened, he was elected to the Legislature and his party gave the Justice portfolio.

So when I write that I was happy to have been paid you can now see that I wasn't refering to getting paid for the rendering. It was nice to get paid for the hundreds of hours put into the project. The project and the process was certainly a struggle. I truly feel very sorry for my client. (He probably can't afford to retire any more!)

Regards, Ross

<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>

[preid]

I cannot see the thumbnail (just an outline where it should be) and when I click on it I get a "file not found" message. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_frown.gif[/img]

Also, in the top left hand corner of the fourum an image (connecting to i-us.infopop.net) never loads. Paranoia sets in. Does anyone else have this happen to them??
Phil

[athena]

Phil,

I have the exact same problems.
<ul>
<LI>seeing the empty image box at the top of every forum --- I finally isolated that as being a problem with the page being written for IE visitors more than for Netscape vistors (not throwing any blame just observing a fact)
<ul>
<LI>since you posted that you had this problem, and since I was able to see one of Ross' other pages, I suddenly wondered how could Ross' server be selectively failing on that thumbnail and link but not on the other thumbnail and link??[/list]
<LI>I tried viewing this page in IE . . . aha! IE is more forgiving about interpreting HTML code.
<LI>Where my Netscape sees

http://www.designstop.com/misc/mahone bay.jpg

<LI>My IE sees the same link and compensates for the space and places a %20 in the URL. So I actually find the image at

http://www.designstop.com/misc/mahone%20bay.jpg

[/list]

OK so I wasn't losing sleep over this but I feel better having applied some HTML sleuthing skills and discovered why the thumbnail and image were missing.

Athena
[img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_cool.gif[/img]

[arnold foss]

Ross

Pity about the project, (and the engineer); excellent image and I'm glad to hear you got paid for it. Earmarked your webpage after checking it out. Lot's of useful information and I hope you can find the time to continue.

Arnold

[Ross Macintosh]

Thanks for your investigation! I guess it's okay to post with the html but don't use file names containing spaces (that's always good html practice - but sometimes I'm sloppy). On my other post with a remotely served thumbnail I tried to have the html center the thumbnail. In my IE5 browser the i/us forum didn't render the <c></c> tag.

I understand that this forum software only allows editing of your posts for a limited time. I can't fix the problem with the space in the file name. If it's possible for our moderators to edit all posts without the time restriction - I ask that one of them edit my original post, taking out the spaces ( the "%20" ) in the two file names. In a moment I will upload new appropriately renamed files to my server.

Thanks, Ross


<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>

[This message was edited by Ross Macintosh on August 13, 2000 at 01:41 PM.]

[This message was edited by Ross Macintosh on August 13, 2000 at 01:42 PM.]

[Ross Macintosh]

If you aren't seeing the thumbnail it would be because my server wasn't doing its job of serving the file.(So much for guaranteed 99.9% uptime!) So if you don't see it or the linked image it has nothing to do with i/us or its server.

I'm glad you guys like the image. In my work as an architectural designer I have found xara really useful for developing reasonably informative illustrations about my designs. Architects usually communicate with each other with pencil or pen sketches. Unfortunately even very good sketches often fail to adequately communicate the design ideas. Thankfully, I have found that with xara it is possible to bring enough realism to the ideas that others can "buy" into the ideas. I would love to be accomplished at 3d modeling for its ability to communicate but until I develope those skills I'll stick with xara.

Regards, Ross

<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>

[preid]

Thanks for that Athena.
Phil
PS. Nice stuff Ross! [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

[Ross Macintosh]

The image here is a thumbnail link to a bigger version of the illustration.



I designed the condo housing project a few years ago and it has been held up by a zoning dispute ever since. I just learned yesterday that our provincial Supreme Court has overthrown my client's development agreement with the the elected town council who had approved the project. It is very discouraging
[img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_frown.gif[/img] but I did get to have fun rendering the project with xara - and I was paid.

Regards, Ross
PS. In the time the project was on hold, the structural engineer died

[img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_frown.gif[/img]

<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>

[This message was edited by Mike Bailey on August 24, 2000 at 04:03 AM.]