Fairborn-Wright Offices in Detail

One should note this is called Fairborn-Wright because Fairborn had annexed south to take in WSU and the Colonel Glenn area, so what we are looking at is legally within the city of Fairborn. Beavercreek also annexed northward into this area, controlling the western reaches of Colonel Glenn.

Making Pancake Buildings Special

Typically spec offices are pretty banal. Boxes to house stuff. Lately we have been seeing them with really kitchy historical details. But in this case there is an attempt to "do something" with what ordinarily be either silly or dull, but doing it using a late modern aesthetic.

First off it's all done up in brick. And a certain type of brick (we'll see that later). There are minimal windows facing out, and it looks pretty blank and minimalist, like a lot of modern architecture.



Approaching the courtyard buildings, one can see how the designer varied the building perimeter, stepping the walls out so one enters the building, and the courtyard, by sliding between walls. Additional articulation is provided by the large wood fascias over the doorways.


Another approach into the courtyard, which is gradually revealed. The brick here is not engineering brick, but a sort of used rough brick, giving a warm texture to the wall. The wall on the right uses decorative coursing, which one can see in the distance as well. Nice use of ground cover to add additional visual interest, with low trees creating a bit of intimacy at the entrance.

But that black plastic mailbox? Whatever.


The grand finale is the courtyard.

The buildings have big picture windows opening onto the space, and the walls with patterned coursing act as visual markers for entrances, which are always indirect. The step backs and facade composition activate the space, leading the eye to the gaps in the buildings, but the exterior parking lots are never visible. As noted before the landscaping also works to articulate entry points, with trees and ground cover at some of the entrances.


Unfortunatly that's as good as it gets. The additional buildings follow the same aesthetic of rough brick and sliding planes, but face parking lots instead of a courtyard.


Other Fairborn Wright Buildings.

The "twin towers". Perhaps also dating from the 1970s, this was the first of two three-story "spec boxes". The design is consistent with the pancake buildings as it uses brick, and the window treatment emphasises the verticle, which was the first and last time this was done on Colonel Glenn.. The twin is visible to the left in the background, behind the flag.



A later building from the early 1980s, perhaps. One sees a bit of the same aesthetic with the verticle windows, but also an angled atrium feature.


The last office building at Fairborn-Wright, dating from the mid 1980s. Now occupied by defense contractor Northrup-Grumman. The brick and horizontal band windows would be see further west on Colonel Glenn at Signal Hill and Ashford Center. And again the popular atrium feature at the entrance.



I don't know who developed these offices or the Fairborn-Wright office park. Whoever they were they did a good job with that courtyard ensemble.

Building Colonel Glenn I: Fairborn-Wright Office Park

From tiny acorns mighty oaks grow. Such was it for the Colonel Glenn/WSU/Fairfield Commons edge city.

We saw how Krug International was the first mover on Colonel Glenn. The next development started in 1975-77, the Fairborn-Wright Office Park, which was just down the road from Krug.


One can see the wisdom of aligning I-675 away from Colonel Glenn as it did open up a strip of land for development. As these were fairly large parcels (as indicated by the fence lines) development could be better planned, more consistent and coherent.

By 1983 the decision was to build I-675, and construction had already pushed the interstate beyond this area toward US 35. This gauranteed the value of the Colonel Glenn corridor as a development site. Fairborn-Wright was joined by Miller-Valentines' Wright Executive Park.

A close-up showing the early 1980s development. The orignal 1970s offices were joined by two new buildings, and third was under construction. Site prep was underway for the first part of Wright Executive Park.


This set of buildings are historic as the first spec office buildings off Colonel Glenn. The very start of this part of Greene County as a new downtown.

What's interesting is that there was some attention to architectural detail and site planning here. Especially for the low rises arranged around the courtyard, which were among the first to go up.
In some ways this is akin to the first spec office development on the other end of I-675, Governors Square on OH 735 near the I-675 interchange. Both of these examples tried to do more with site planning, creating landscaped, pedestrian -oriented interior spaces, rather than simply setting the office building amid parking.

Next, a closer look at the buildings, showing what appears banal at first glance actually has some subtle design moves.

The Arcade Has Been Sold

Big front page news. One of the Daytons' best buildings has been sold to two Wisconsin businessmen, Gunther Berg and Wendell Sturtz, dba Dayton Arcade LLC. The two have been doing renovations in their Wisconsin town, and apparently have a good rep there (see the Dayton Most Metro Arcade thread for more intel on the track record).

Yet, the question is where is the $50M - $60M needed to restore the complex going to come from? Local businessman and downtown re-developer Bob Schiffler backed out on bidding for the property reportedly due to lack of tenants needed to make the financing work.

One guesses we maybe a year or two to see what happens with the Arcade, which continues to deteriorate.

Ultimately, the worse case is what happened to the Ecki Building. The Arcade becomes such a public nuisance that the city buys the building (or inherits it after a future failed sheriffs sale) and demolishes it.

Recycling Colonel Glenn: WSU moves Across The Street

Is the Colonel Glenn Highway strip old enough to recycle? In one case yes.

The site is the former Krug International operation. Krug was founded in 1959 as a research contractor for Wright-Patterson AFB, and built its offices and research facility out on Colonel Glenn sometime before the 1970s, since it appears on this early 1970s aerial photo.


Krug would have been the first commercial development on Colonel Glenn aside from the country village of New Germany, and in a way mimics the first movers out at I-75 and OH 725, which were corporate HQ/plant complexes.

One should say it's somewhat disingenous to say that Colonel Glenn strip is "too new" to recycle as New Germany has been pretty much been recycled into oblivion, losing any independent identity. The story of the disappearance of New Germany could possibly be a blog post all its own.

One can see how the rearrangement of the roads in this area due to I-675 helped distort the character of the place.

Krug International to University Park

Krug International was sold to out-of-town investors in the mid 1990s, and was moved to Houston around 1997-1998. The vacant buildings were sold to a church in 1998. Sometime in the 2000s the church moved, selling the property to Mills-Morgan, a developer active in the WSU/Fairfield Commons area, with some involvement by Oberer, a developer more active south of town.

Mills-Morgan cleared the site and redeveloped it as University Park. Three buildings went up, but it looks like there's room for at least three more.

At first glance this looks like yet another spec office development on Colonel Glenn using the proximity to Wright State as naming opportunity ("University Park"). Instead, there really is a connection with WSU, as all the buildings are signed with WSU activities (except one, which just says "Wright State University".
So one has to wonder what's up. Was this some sort of deal between the developer and the university, where the university gets new space, but not via the state capital budget? Presumably there is an annual lease cost involved, so it must pencil-out for the uni to lease the space rather than build new.

Daytonology Returns to Suburbia

We've been on a lengthy detour into Dayton stuff over the past few months. But enough is enought. Only 20% or less of the population lives in the city, and nearly all the local blogosphere focus is on the city, really just a handful of city places: Downtown/Oregon/South Park/UD. Over and over again. Like there is nothing else in this metropolitian area.

Not what this blog was ever intended to be. Well, parochial, yes, but in the greater sense of "Dayton", not the narrow cool-kids version of the city.

Andrew Blauvelt has an excellent piece at Design Observer on suburbia: City and Suburb, Worlds Away.

Whether in art or architecture, the suburbs seem to lack cultural authorship and a “back story” — the suburban landscape simply unfolds ex nihilo — out of nowhere and out of nothing. This lack of identity also represents a lack of history. Suburban time is strangely suspended, literally an arrested development frozen in its initial phases of construction: no wonder most people conjure an image of suburbia as a series of new housing starts and barren landscapes. From William Garnett’s photos of Lakewood Park in California to Robert Adams’ pictures of suburban Denver, there is a long tradition of using photography to record these processes of transformation, and because they are focused on an early moment in the life cycle of suburbia, they do not typically provide any evidence of human settlement, aspiration, or inhabitation. Most suburbs are now old enough to have a history, and enough inhabitants over time to establish an identity....

.....The inability to situate a suburban aesthetics or to develop a language and theory to assess suburban forms as anything but an aberrant urbanism is clearly one of the crucial hurdles in constructing a more objective and less judgmental approach.

Daytonology aims to return to developing the backstory for Dayton suburbia, an objective inquiry, though one can't sometimes resist an occasional ironic spin to the tale.

The Third & Main Problem

The threatening problem @ Third & Main, that everyone is talking about. What is it?


Concisely stated the problem is "Too many blacks!". Specfically too many rowdy black teenagers congregating at the bus stop here. Even if they weren't rowdy (and not all of them are), or even teenagers, the fact that they and the majority of people waiting for the bus here black plays into white fears about black crime


Daytonology addressed almost a year ago in Fear of a Black Dayton (a post that got no responses, perhaps indicating a willingness to avoid the subject), and about how media reports color racial stereotypes (which would have a direct effect on crime perceptions downtown) in Racial Stereotyping and the Evening News (another post that got no replys).

This is not to say there aren't incidents going on downtown (which could escalate into a minor civil disturbance like there was two years ago or so), but that a lot of this is perceptual, driven by racial stereotyping by whites. And it's nearly impossible to conciously change this due to the social segregation between the races.

The RTA Transit Center & Inner City Retail

RTA's moving of bus loading from curbside to a mid-block loading/unloading platform (replacing Mall Park and the old Admiral Benbow) will solve this "too many black faces" problem by moving waiting and boarding off the street into the transit hub buildings and loading area. It will also allow RTA to ban troublemakers from the waiting areas, so the crowds won't be getting stirred up by fights and other things.



Problem solved. But is a high concentration of black folks down really a problem or is it an opportunity?

One suspects that the concentration of blacks coming downtown at this location generates enough potential foot traffic for this to be the last block on Main with real honest-to-goodness sidewalk retail. And this retail appears directed toward the black market.

Starting from 4th, Grace Beauty Supply, which moved across the street from the Kuhns Building.


Next, the "Hair Plaza", which sounds like a wig shop, but is also a variety store.


Then, TNT Fashions, which has this sidewalk sale thing going on . Which is pretty cool as it reminds me of downtown LA a bit (which functions as a big Mexican shopping center, especially on Sundays).

And next door to that Honey Be, which is a young womens/girls clothing store.

All this is on the east side of Main. Across the street there is a Subway and Suney's, which says its a Beauty supply place, but is really a variety store, having a bit of the dollar store or 5 & 10 to it. This is actually a good place to pick up quick notions and things; yer humble host bought some socks here once.

Sunys store window, with more Obama-wear.
Continuing down the street there is one of the few restaurants open downtown on Saturday, this cafeteria-style Chinese place (which also has a back entrance from the bus waiting room)

...which is this nice interior space. The door at the end opens onto Third Street, which also is a popular waiting spot. Note the stores at the end an fast food places on the left wall.


I count about four retail spaces, three of which are occupied. Here are three micro-retail spots (two occupied with the one vacancy in-between)
And a fourth, a sort of snack shop/magazine stand type of place.

Since Third is pretty busy too, there is this walk-up lottery window from one of the shops. With the re-orientation of foot traffic and waiting into the hub area this window will probably stay shut.

Putting it all together, and showing the to RAL places (which are also a form of consumer services) one can see this block to be, instead of a problem, one of the healthier ones downtown. But there needs to be more on the west side of the street.


If one looks at this as a market, one can count how many people are coming through downtown by bus and say this is the market. And one can look at what census tracts most bus riders originate and use these tracts as the feeder neighborhoods for a transit-based retail district.

Such an strategy would be a new twist on the Social Compact approach to showing that underserved inner city areas really have more economic potential if one looks very close, closer than the census, at the population and economic activity of the inner city neighborhoods.



Developing....or really expanding.... a transit retail district, which would cater to a predominantly black market (but also to poorer whites), would be anathema to the vision of a "family friendly" (i.e. less intimidating to whites) and yuppified downtown. But how realistic is this vision given the entrenched racial stereotypes and the difficulties of growing downtown housing for yuppies?

Transit retail would aknowledge socioeconomic realities and use them to build and grow a downtown for the people who actually use the place.

Blogging on Greasy Spoons (sort of)

..."Dayton's Most Respected Food Blog" , Diving Through Dayton is certainly one of the better-written and witty blogs in town, at only a few posts.


Check it out here.

So far they've reviewed Wah Fuh, North River Coffeehouse, and East 5th Street Grille, and lived to tell the tale, and if you've driven the city enough you know exactley where these are.