City Hall follows Western theme

There was no showdown over the design of the new City Hall Monday night.

In fact, only a handful of people turned out to hear a presentation from architect Scott Steele — and they didn’t come for a shootout, just some critique.

Mayor David Elliott attributed the relatively muted response to the fact city officials had opted to design the facility in the vein of the 1880s Western theme.

“If we changed it from a Western them, we’d have 30 people in here complaining that we didn’t follow the rules. That’s all I’ve heard is make sure you follow your own rules. So that’s what we did,” said Elliott.

Steele explained his firm’s research on the false front building of the 19th century.

“What they were trying to do was make the buildings look more substantial; like downtown masonry buildings back East,” said Steele.

The false front design of the new city hall will be applied to all sides of the building, Steele said. In the front of the facility where the main public entrance is, the false front will run to 30-feet-10-inches.

The building has been orientated on the property in such a way as to keep the existing large ponderosas intact.

A few attendees asked if the design of the new library and city hall were going to complement each other. The answer came back as a “no.”

Bob Bridgeford, Sisters area resident, felt that the town was missing an opportunity to create more of a campus-like setting with the construction of two new public buildings on the same piece of land.

On the general design of the building, Bridgeford said, “We’re trapping ourselves into kind of a uniformity where we’re going to wind up looking like a Western TV set here if we’re not careful.

“If you look at great Western towns like Durango or Santa Fe or Aspen, those places don’t have such uniform buildings. The false front Western buildings were built as the architect himself pointed out, to give a feeling of permanence, where one didn’t exist. When you get too many of them together, then you get sort of this false Disneyland look,” said Bridgeford.

Sam Gammond, another Sisters resident offered softer criticism, “They took the theme a little more seriously than I thought that they would of, but it’ll fit fine. It’ll be kind of right along the direction that they’ve taken the city for the last several years.”