In the 1970’s, Oklahoma City demolished its entire urban core, leveling over five hundred buildings.

    by Hungry_Roll6848

    22 Comments

    1. BobbyTables829 on

      Didn’t even keep like the few buildings people really wanted to keep lol okay then.

    2. TupperwareConspiracy on

      Honestly I’m always a sucker for urban planning schemes over the course of history. Many have been tried and very few, even those generally well respected today, perform the actual function their designers originally intended.

      A lot of conceptual ‘Utopia’ ism generally confined by a very impractical view of how the future would actually go down. Unfortunately quite a bit of quality spaces – factories and warehouses built between 1880 and 1920 – that would later prove perfect for redevelopment as loft housing & commercial spaces were demolished to make way for tomorrow-land type fantasy that never materialized.

      Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City is particularity interesting – a very midwestern take on the approach [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadacre_City](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadacre_City) . In the end there’s something of a perverse charm in the American landscape and over time communities will adapt and evolve spaces in ways no architect can predict and a lot of the ‘charm’ of a certain spot, i.e. Austin or Denver, can only be achieved by letting the process take it’s natural course.

    3. NotObviouslyARobot on

      And that’s why we call it Oklahoma Shitty.

      Nothing but subdivisions as far as the eye can see

    4. next-station-nana on

      Urban renewal projects really proved to be a bigger blight on our cities than the issues they claimed to be solving.

    5. ok this explains a lot for me… when I was in OKC, it was noticeable that the downtown just kind of “stops” at the edges…. there’s the devon tower which is cool, and some surrounding smaller buildings, but then it’s just flat land

    6. Global_Criticism3178 on

      History will not be kind to I.M. Pei. He is to Architecture what Chris Bangle is to automotive design.

    7. Oklahoma seems to have a thing for annihilating all the interesting parts of itself in order to adhere to whatever white people fantasy seems to be on brand at whatever given point in time

    8. Basic-Collection5416 on

      Oh, I wondered why the downtown was so sad and ugly when I drove through there. Today I learned. 

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