First Day Recap Part 2

One of the interesting things about Omaha is the amount of private investment in public projects. Because of Berkshire Hathaway and the time frame, there are a lot of charitable people who were first investors with Warren Buffet and now are getting old, and choosing to give some of their earnings to the city of Omaha. This creates a strong private base on which these projects are funded. Virtually every project in the city has had a combination of public ad private investment.

Along the same lines of this mixed investment structure was the ConAgra corporate Campus .One of the most formative decisions was the city condemning and destroying parts of the industrial fabric to allow Conagra to build their campus and a public park. The precedent was there for the rehabilitation and reprogramming of industrial structures, but the city and the corporation wanted to start from scratch. The fight over this went all the way to the supreme court, but eventually the corporation got their way and so the corporate campus is built today. My issue with this was it destroyed the street grid making the first street on the grid start at 10th street. I've talked alot about form structure, and this seems to be a prime example of the difficulty sites have. The park is nice but it creates its own lake as the amenity rather than using the river as the amenity.

I'm in the process of computerizing a drawing about this, but one of the things I found interesting was the riverfront on the other side of I-480. There, the pollution was so bad that the ground was simply capped with a plastic membrane and built on top of. What this means is that the area has to be treeless. What sits on the river right here is a so called "destination restaurant", with parking to support it. The problem is the flood wall. and the terrace that was built. (I should preface my judgement with the fact that Omaha is engaging their waterfront, so its doing something). The problem with the way this was built is it provides too much space between the water and the restaurant, creating a dead zone. That means unless there is some event happening, the waterfront is doomed to feel empty and unoccupied. Rather, the event spaces should be pushed to other areas and the building should be pushed towards the water, or the terrace pulled back farther.

Anyway here are some panoramas I took Yesterday.

View of the Lake at ConAgra's Corporate Campus