Michigan State Capitol - Heritage Hall & More

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  • I was able to visit the capitol of Texas in Austin and their capitol building is very similar to ours, it was built by the same person. Their building has a much larger front park with large statues describing various points of Texas history. The back of the building has a very large underground network of conference rooms, offices, and meeting rooms. This would be very similar to the first proposal for this. The scaled-down proposal is still a great improvement and will help dramatically. The next major step to making our capitol building beautiful is to replace some of the surface parking lots closest to the building with parks, and build on the remaining surface parking lots.

  • parking lots to parks is a fantastic idea for west side of dowtown. I think it would work best if they were turned into sports parks with large, programmable sports fields -- soccer, football, basketball. I think a park in this area would have to be a 'desitination' because there's not enough foot traffic to draw people into a passive leisure park. I could picture something like the Munn field at MSU. Nice flat open lawn with field lights and occasional bleachers, portable soccer goals, etc. Presumably you could re-use the same underground drainage system and and maybe even the lights from the parking lots.

  • edited January 2019

    Mich - The article I linked was indeed the same as Jared's, but it had been updated to funding has been approved from may be approved. I didn't notice it was the same link though!

  • edited January 2019

    I found this tweet from a few days ago which confuses me a little:

    I guess we'll find out when more details come out like a site plan, but I thought this was supposed to be accessed from the west and not the north? Maybe the poster is confused, himself?

  • This image was used in the link from the main page on the desktop site. It looks like they've moved the entrance over to the Ottawa side, there could still be a second entrance under the bridge or elsewhere though.

  • Thanks for this. Yeah, it looks like they'll be utilizing the existing drive. I think this is also where they put the generator and storage room as part of the current renovation, though it may be a bit east of this entrance. I imagine they are not releasing anything for security purposes, but I'd love to see a site plan to orient myself as to what they built as part of this recent renovation, and how Heritage Hall will fit into all of this.

  • Yeah, I don't have much idea of how this will be oriented other than that it will be under the west lawn. With funding in place and what looks like a lot of the design work done I wonder how soon this is going to get going?

  • MJMJ
    edited January 2019

    This looks nice. I really like the wildflower meadow on top. Makes a lot of sense to use existing infrastructure. This side of the capital grounds has always been too nice to use merely as a utility/service entrance. Smart move.

  • Thanks for posting. I was looking at an old photo of the Capitol and I was reminded that there were a lot of trees on the west side but also a lot of surface parking lots right behind the building. I believe that there will be no parking lots in that area when all the projects are finished. That will be a great improvement if I am right.
    I was wondering about the Capitol Complex expansion the other day when folks were talking about the stores that were along MLK/Logan to the west of the Capitol. Did the state clear all the blocks near Kalamazoo Street to the south of the court building? I was just wondering if that land was part of the plans for state buildings at one time or why these blocks were leveled. This area would seem to be a good place to develope I wonder why the owners of the land just sit on it for so many years?
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