To the Editor:

This is an open letter to Barry Rabner.

To achieve “evidence-based design … guided by experience [and] instinct.’ your “design team articulated a set of guiding principles … based on the understanding that a building is more than a container.” The design had to “achieve very important … goals,” and thus “used focus groups with patients,” at one point making “more than 300 changes to the existing design.”

A similar process resulted in the design standards for the structure to replace the hospital on its old site, in the Witherspoon neighborhood of Princeton. The goals here were of course not patient-based but neighborhood-based: low rooflines, open and inviting public space, walkways, a mix of commercial and residential uses. Like you, we wanted to be “up-to-date,” urging ‘green’ design because, also like you, we knew that “lowering operating costs” would help both the developer and the community.

Like your goals, ours were specific — but they bear no fruit in the design offered by the company to which you are selling this part of our neighborhood. Merely the highest bidder, this developer specializes in standardized plans for gated communities — not in neighborhoods. Plaudits for 20 percent affordable housing, we need all we can get. But must it be in a backward-looking monolith that cuts corners, as testified to by its tenants in other U.S. cities? (See tenant reviews posted at www.simplesite.com/princetonview.)

It may be too late to reject this particular bid, but it is not too late to expect the bidder to honor standards known at the time of bidding. Ron Ladell offers to negotiate. Great, but his company has already received all that Princeton needs to give: the high density needed for high profits. It is his turn to give open access, not a closed enclave. There is no reason why there cannot be a public walkway through the development: in one side and out the other.

We beg you to support community efforts to enforce the kind of design standards you yourself advocate. To quote N.Y. Times architecture critic Richard Kimmelman, writing recently, “Architecture … acts as part of a larger social and economic ecology, or else it elects to be a luxury, meaningless except to itself” — and to those who profit from it.

Let us have development that is sensitive to the needs of the community it serves.

Mary Clurman

Harris Road