Creating Places: A Citizen Observer's Look at Nashville's Built Environment


Writer's Note: William Williams' interest in the manmade environment dates to 1970, at which point the then-young Williams started a collection of postcards of city skylines. The collection now numbers 1,000-plus cards. Among the writer's specific interests are exterior building design, city district planning, demographics, signage, mixed-use development, mass transit and green/sustainable construction and living. Williams began his Creating Places column with The City Paper in February 2005. The column in its original form was discontinued in September 2008 and reinvented via this blog in November 2008. Creating Places can be found on the home page of the website of The City Paper, at which Williams has worked in various capacities since October 2000.

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Creating Places: PBR Mural

If the Hotel Indigo on West End Avenue was not already Midtown's most bold building based on color scheme, it surely is now.

On the upper corner of the east wall of HI's blue parking garage is now a massive Pabst Blue Ribbon mural. Standing about 15-20-feet tall, the colorful, cool and eye-catching artwork (I spotted it for the first time today and thing the artist is Jim Comey) renders the almost-cobalt-blue car-storage facility all the more funky and edgy. I have to say it looks killer.

Kudos to officials with both PBR (which began in 2007 its branding efforts in Nashville in Columbus, Ohio — targeting young hipsters and bohemians) and Hotel Indigo for this move. With excessive "dead space" and junk (in the form of surface parking lots, windows-lacking buildings, non-descript free-standing buildings, etc.), parts of urban Nashville are crying for murals on private buildings, public art, trees, water fountains, streetlight banners — anything to minimize the harshness of our often crappy built landscape. The Pabst-Hotel Indigo mural is a step in the right direction. I'll toast a 16-ounce PBR to that.



1 comment:

  1. William,

    Good morning and happy friday! Please find me on Facebook Jane Moore Nashville.

    Enjoyed your blogs!

    Have a great day!
    Jane

    ReplyDelete