We’ve been tinkering around with the idea of doing a virtual facelift to Downtown Jacksonville and the surrounding urban neighborhoods for a while now. Usually what happens is we will be driving, or better yet walking along one of the downtown streets and see a building with great “bones,” but for whatever reason has either fallen to disrepair, been neglected, or had some unattractive additions over the years. Of course then we’d have to share ideas on how we think the building could be made to look more attractive and in turn make the area more attractive.

Usually that is where it stopped, throw out a couple design ideas and forget about it. With the Urban Facelift Project we want to take those ideas a step further and get some things on paper. This project is definitely a work in progress and we have some ideas in place on how we’d like to see this thing take form. We’d also like to hear from you guys and your thoughts on how or if this can be beneficial, or if there’s a building you’d like to see added to the list, or just your thoughts in general.

The Urban Facelift Project is an open ended series of quick and dirty visualizations of what can be done to an existing building to make it more attractive to the general public. There are no clients, there are no fees, and there are no pre-existing guidelines…other than trying to make the buildings look as cool as possible to us and hopefully to you. We’re hoping to make the revisions and tweaks we show for each building as economically feasible as possible. We won’t be demolishing any of the facades and starting with a blank slate, but we’ll be making generally small changes to the facade. Maybe it’s as simple as changing paint color, or introducing another material, or adding vegetation. Unfortunately one of the best ways to dynamically change the appearance of a building is by the use of lighting, which we’re really not going to be able to focus on.

Each time a building is introduced into the project we will document it in 3 ways: the existing structure in it’s surroundings, a sketch showing broad ideas for re-imagining the building, and finally a rendering of the suggested changes. Then we will post a slide show of the progression.

We usually won’t be discussing what we’ve done, hopefully you’ll get the idea from the graphics.  However if there is anything you want to comment on, feel free and we’ll be responding to those.

Also if you would like to do your own Urban Facelift Project, send us the 3 images and we’ll make sure to post it.

That being said, below is Urban Facelift Project #1 53 Union

The existing building and surroundings.

The sketch.

The rendering.

The slideshow.