The design and level of detail could be appreciated on many scales and levels. The clean, contemporary use of brick to the height setbacks/relationship to the original Sugar building to the playfullness of the windows and balconies of the residential levels, the Sugar3 building is definitely a positive contribution to our cityscape and I hope will set a positive precident for thoughtful building design in Denver.

Historic copies is not the only option for LoDo, as Denver is becoming a more progressive city.

The perspective looking down 16th street looks decent (can't say I like the Blake side nearly as much), and the whole Market Street Station area is looking worlds better than 10 years ago thanks to this building and the adjacent 16 Market Sqaure.

What's more, the next decade may hold just as much change as the previous one: there's the potential for the W hotel and the associated parcel next door to be developed, and the bus station itself will eventually be sold to a developer to help finance union station.

Frankly, I don't see what about this building is abstract. Columns, beams, windows, balconies. It has all the same "building blocks" of any other building, it just uses a different language to order them.

Though I will admit that the irregularity of the balconies and the windows on top are not as successful as they could have been. I don't want classical order or even symmetry up there, but there should at least be a sense of balance and I feel it fell a little short there.

My architectural views are a departure from yours BeyondDC, but that does not make them a parody. Like architectural styles, it only means that I make my judgements on a different set of values.

And nothing is certain about this decade! It will definately be interesting to see what name actually sticks 15 years from now. What strange times we live in!

I said:
>when your goal is to be "different", you are reliant on there being something for you to be different from

If you want to disagree with my usage of "regular" to describe non-abstract architecture, that's fair enough. But abstract architecture is absolutely a parody of non-abstract architecture, because the entire goal of abstract architecture is to be a departure from the non-abstract.

Without a whole lot of non-abstract buildings around, abstract buildings are utterly pointless.

And equally scary, just in time for halloween is this building. Sorry, I just don't like it. I think 16 is so much nicer.

I like the scale of the building itself in that location.. its perfect, but I just hate the overt homage to the big squares.. do we need to be so obvious?

Abstract architecture is not a parody of formal architecture, its a departure from it. To look for a parody then perhaps you should go back to the 90's and have a gander at post-modernism.

"Regularity" is not solely a description of architectural features, it is a description of organization. The only dependence this description relies on, is our understanding of the english language. Beyond that I would argue that regularity isn't inherently better than irregularity, unless you are speaking of bowel movements.

I'm happy to disagree about the merits of the building, but if we are going to give little lessons, let's at least do a good job with our definitions of architectural theories.