SOLUTIONS - TYVEK TOWER

The Landmark Hotel is creating lots of controversy in our fair City of Charlottesville. Opinion is weighted that in its present state the Hotel is a depressing eyesore. We at C-B.com have a different view. We love the look of the setting sun peeping through the steel girders at dusk and the appeal the building has as an industrial space like no other in the area. We say forget the luxury hotel with boutiques! Wouldn't it make a lot more sense as an industrial art complex using the mall accessible first-floor entry space as a gallery? One could envision the building as is with solar glass instead of walls, a system of smelting furnaces on every floor, centered in the building and a swimming pool on the roof.

This town is packed with insipid, uninspiring, slacker artists who dabble in finger-painting, trash art, and the like. We C'Villains are seldom exposed to monumental, industrial sculpture, metal casting or any other form of industrial art. What do we get? We get Councilman Satyendra Huja's Fart-In-Place. Nick Currie of the New York Times wrote in an article reviewing Ex-Alumix, a vast refurbished aluminum smelting factory in Bolzano, a city in the Italian Alps, "Who knew that abandoned work spaces could be so beautiful?" Manifattura Tabacchi, a decommissioned tobacco factory in Rovereto dating from 1854 now houses art and Industrial Art and Design was transformed from a burned-out store front on Minneapolis' northeast side. Buffalo's Grain Elevators: Wonders of Industrial Art are seen by many as distinguished works of industrial art. The old C&O coal tower would be a wonderful space if renovated. Unfortunately it's nothing more than a 'crack' tower for years and as a result, a double murderer once made it his home.

Creative thinking is in order or the Tyvek Tower is on the road to being a 'crack' hotel. Halsey Minor filed a breach of contract and fraud suit against Lee Danielson and Lee Danielson intends to counter-sue Halsey Minor. That could take years. In the meantime this little Dali-Domestica has a bird's-eye view from her rooftop garden of the setting sun peeping through the steel girders at dusk.