A block away, Owings Mills-based developer David S. Brown has demolished the historic, irreplaceably idiosyncratic Mechanic Theater and plans to erect a pair of squat residential towers on a retail base destined to house a suburban big-box store. The draft proposal, from architectural firm Shalom Baranes Associates, appears to have one guiding ethos: Consume as much space as possible with the blandest design conceivable. The effect will be something akin to a bleak early-aughts Washington, D.C. office building clumsily plopped into Downtown's historic core with little regard to context beyond a Baltimore-sized budget. It will obstruct views and light from virtually every angle and gift absolutely nothing to the skyline in return. I can't think of a worse architectural trade-off in recent history. While the Mechanic carved a sturdy jigsaw outline of public space, this presents passersby with a crappy-looking wall of glass too ill-proportioned and awkward to pass as minimalist. The old theater offered a human-scaled strip of storefronts that comfortably housed small businesses facing the metro station. Brown's stunted towers of mediocrity will transform Charles Center—the geographic heart of the city—into a clunking mass of oversized, soulless chain stores and anonymous architecture. It's especially insulting to the property owners who were displaced under the wave of urban renewal that built the theater half a century ago. Use of eminent domain was justified by the promise of an urban core of civic assets: a theater and cathedral-like subway station surrounded by public space. But soon, that land will be reborn as a monument to everything wrong with private-sector city building. The whole affair is an unforgivable wound to Baltimore's face. No one will ever love this building.