This week, architectural gadfly, David Brussat, offers a photo essay on Westminster St.


Victoria, Billy and I adventured to Westminster Street to see a friend, Elaine Ostrach Chaika, speak about her book, Humans, Dogs and Civilization, at a bookstore, Symposium Books. Afterwards, we walked up Westminster to Empire, where we dipped into the Foo Fest, an annual block party held by the arts cooperative AS220, I had my camera, and here are some results:

Here is a 10-story Marriott hotel scheduled for October groundbreaking in downtown Spartanburg, S.C. It is lovely, and it is being proposed, designed and built by people quite as human as those who do such work in downtown Providence, R.I., where two cheesy suburban hotels have been proposed that belong out on Jefferson Boulevard, near T.F. Green State Airport.

Is it truly beyond the capacity of Rhode Island architects to design something as beautiful as what is being built in Spartanburg, S.C.?

Spartanburg, S.C., for Christ’s sake!

Is it truly beyond the capacity of Rhode Island developers to imagine building something as nice as this hotel? Is it beyond the capacity of the political leadership of Rhode Island to imagine why the state should seek architecture of this quality? I say quality, not cost, because mark my words, the folks down in Spartanburg, S.C., are on a budget, too. Who is not on a budget? Is it beyond the capacity of Rhode Island newspaper editors to imagine why we don’t have to build junk in order to create jobs?

To be sure, the architect for the Spartanburg, S.C., proposal is not from Spartanburg, S.C. He is David M. Schwarz,  who runs a firm in Washington, D.C. He puts his pants on one leg at a time. Can’t our architects do that?

Just asking.

The Providence Journal ran an editorial yesterday, “Activity vs. eyesore,” that takes a conventional attitude toward economic development that could ensure that Providence’s economy will never be as robust as it ought to be.

The editorial supports razing the city-owned Fogarty Building to build an extended-stay hotel proposed by the Procaccianti Group, of Cranston. The stand puts the paper’s editorial board (of which I was a member for 30 years) at odds with local preservationists, who hold an inordinate regard for this empty, leaky, stinky, ugly hulk.

Tiverton, which faces the twin threat of a mega-retail/residential development and a new casino amid its charms, may rejoice that it has a beautiful new public library under its belt. When the design was shown to me several years ago I said to myself, “Not gonna happen!”

But there it is in all its glory.

The Providence Journal, in Christine Dunn’s story “A new chapter begins for town’s public library,” reports that 500 new library cards have been issued since its opening in June. Also, it came in $500,000 below its $11 million budget. At 23,886 square feet, the new library dwarfs its cute predecessor, the Essex Library.

The photo above shows a library that breathes in the traditionally bucolic character of the town. Tiverton is among the loveliest names for a place, and its architecture should reflect the quiet beauty that is its brand.

Designed by Union Studios, in Providence, with Douglas Kallfelz as lead architect, the library’s arched and gabled entry portico features a tower with decorative arches etched into its sides that reflect those of the portico. At the other end, special spaces inside the library are highlighted with gabled bays connected by a terrace behind its own three arches. The design’s simplicity belies the size and complexity of the interior, which has about six times the room as the Essex, which remains.

They say architecture is the great unsung happiness of life. Well, these days that is debatable, but when when a work of design manages to express the pleasure of reading while accommodating the heavier burden that libraries take upon themselves in the modern era, well, it’s no wonder that the market for library cards is in growth mode!

Let us hope Tiverton can thwart the twin evils headed its way – but if the town is not thrice lucky, its leaders should propose that the twin evils (the “mall” and the casino) are made to parade in the falseface of beauty.

(Here is the deep skinny on the new library, “The Story of Tiverton’s Quarter-Century Crusade to Build a New Public Library,” by Gina Macris for the Rhode Island Library Report.)

(Editor's note: Gadabout David Brussat posted a series of stories about the building of a glass addition on Providence's historic Grace Episcopal Church this week on his blog, Architecture Here and There. We have condensed them into one piece, with subheadings. You're welcome.)


A failure of Grace

The Providence Journal reports today in “Age and Grace” that Grace Episcopal Church, in downtown Providence, plans as part of its restoration to add a new glass addition. This festered within me all day, and so I went downtown to take some pictures to help me assess where it would be added to the church, designed in the Gothic style by the ecclesiastical architect Richard Upjohn, of New York, and opened in 1848. The Journal story, by Patrick Anderson, reads:

Repair work on the building exterior is already under way, and church leaders are finishing plans to extend a new parish hall off the west side of the building. The new hall would replace the church’s current basement gathering space with a glass-enclosed, wheelchair-accessible, single-story structure fronted by a new sanctuary garden.

It seems as if the glass addition would take up at least part of the church’s current parking lot, seen from Westminster Street through a wrought-iron fence. The firm hired for the job is Centerbrook Architects, of Centerbrook, Conn., which designed the elegant restoration and addition to Ocean House in Watch Hill. But a visit to its website reveals that beauty is not the firm’s only product.

A glass addition would almost certainly represent a fall from grace for Grace Church. Even if it were as modest as the glass addition behind Round Top, the Congregational church nearby on Weybosset, it would be as much a spiritual as an aesthetic betrayal of its people, its neighborhood and its mission. Churches are not normally expected to stick their thumb in the eye of their community.

While my family and I were living downtown just a couple blocks from this church, I used to take my little boy Billy, then age 1 or 2, to services there, not to inculcate him early with lofty thoughts but to try to imbue him with a taste for beauty. (You can’t start too early!) I cannot forget its lovely services. The congregation was so nice to Billy and me.

We moved out of downtown with the arrival at Grace of the Rev. Jonathan Huyck. Hard to believe now, but to take the job in Providence he left a congregation in Paris. I have a call in to him, and maybe he will assure me that my skepticism has jumped the gun. A glass parish hall needn’t be an abomination. It could pick up rather than rejecting, as usual, the church’s architecture. But these days that is rare. I will report what he says.

Grace in glass additions

In researching glass additions worthy of downtown Providence’s Grace Episcopal Church, I came across the image above of the Royal Opera House (formerly Covent Garden), designed by Edward Middleton Barry and completed in 1858, with its elegant glass addition followed by a bungled modernist addition with a glass “hinge.”

The “addition” is actually the former flower market of Covent Garden, which was built in 1830 but absorbed into the opera house in the 1990s. A next-door neighbor became an addition, which doesn’t quite fit the program of Grace Church. Still, it offers an idea for how a glass addition could work.

Another idea comes to us from the Tietz Department Store, in Berlin. Completed in 1900, it no longer survives. But this photo does, and while it has little to say about the fate of Grace Church under the shadow of glass, it does suggest an infinitude of possibility that need not bring an air of sterility, or worse, into the makeup of Richard Upjohn’s local masterpiece.

The department store suggests that even the plainest glass, fitted into a well-articulated frame, can prove enchanting. Even a one-story parish hall of glass is not going to be made entirely of glass. So what framing is contemplated? Something as flat and featureless as glass (bless its heart in all other regards) requires, to set off its asceticism, a degree of ornament in the vertical and horizontal framing members that enclose each pane of plate. It needn’t be elaborate but it mustn’t be as plain as the glass itself.

I hope all of this will amount to something interesting to chew on as Grace Church completes its planning for a new parish hall.


Reverend, grace and Grace


Had a very nice talk by phone with the Rev. Jonathan Huyck, of Grace Episcopal Church, and he assured me not just that nothing was set in cement regarding the design of a proposed new parish hall (possibly of glass), but that he understands that there are alternatives to the sort of glass carbuncle the idea of which, for now, is a shadow passing slowly over the future of one of the city’s most beautiful buildings.

He said he would give a traditional design solution for the parish hall equal billing with the modernist “solutions” that he and his board are sure to hear about from those who, as far as beauty is concerned, have already fallen from grace.

A very large retail and residential development proposed for Tiverton by the Carpionato Group has advanced through several stages of town review and approval without, so far as I can find online, any indication of what the place would look like. The Journal’s story today, “Big crowd, fiery debate on big development proposal in Tiverton,” had no pictures of the plan, once called Tiverton Crossings and now called Tiverton Glen. But the story suggests that trying to pull a fast one on the citizens of Tiverton is unlikely to succeed.

Carpionato is capable of pleasant enough design packages. Its proposal for a development on the east bank of the Providence River, part of the Route 195 corridor, was beautiful, but it has stalled since the 195 commission sold to a rival developer one of the parcels Carpionato had planned to build on. As for the firm’s signature development, Chapel View on Route 2 in Cranston, its renovation of old buildings of the former state Training School, including the chapel for its juvenile delinquents, was fine, but the overall project is marred by the mediocre quality of new buildings between the old ones.

Carpionato has allowed several projects to fall through, including hotels in Providence on the triangular land at the northeast corner of Burnside Park/Kennedy Plaza, and on land cleared by razing the old Produce Terminal across Route 95 from Providence Place.

What seems clear is that Carpionato lacks the developmental drive to bull its way through local opposition. That should be encouraging to citizens of Tiverton who oppose the firm’s proposal there.

Even if the project Carpionato intends for Tiverton were elegant enough to please Prince Charles, it would be a hard sell in Tiverton, a very low-key, bucolic community. The project is just too big.

Here is a presentation by Carpionato, somewhat confusing as to whether it includes any attempt to illustrate what Tiverton Glen might look like, but generally illustrative of the firm’s aesthetic tastes, which range from excellent to execrable. The apparent absence of architectural renderings for Tiverton Glen on the firm’s or the town planning board’s websites at this stage of the project should certainly raise eyebrows.

Economic development is where the rubber hits the road in a democracy – where voting most directly reflects the interests and the sentiments of citizens. People buy houses and pay property taxes in Tiverton because they like it. They have a right to crank up the drawbridge and keep it that way.

Of course, Carpionato and its supporters in Tiverton have an equal right to argue that the new revenue represented by the proposed development would be worth the erosion of the town’s ambiance, its quality of life. If they can persuade enough Tivertonians of this, then Tiverton is likely to feel the winds of change, like almost every other place.

However, the planners, the council members and the developers do not have a right to trample on the town’s comprehensive plan, which is also a product of its voters and reflects their idea of the paradise they call Tiverton. They have every right to be angry if they conclude that officials are trying to facilitate a Carpionato effort to get around the principles embodied in the comprehensive plan.

My next blog will be about Davy Crockett, the frontiersman from Tennessee who had an especially evocative vocabulary according to The Adventure of English, by Melvyn Bragg. Citizens of Tiverton might find words invented and popularized by the King of the Wild Frontier useful to deploy as the Carpionato project rolls merrily along.

It It. It appears that the architect of Terminal 2 of North Korea’s international airport, Ma Won Chun, was executed because the Dear Leader failed to appreciate the design. This according to “Kim Jong Un EXECUTES airport architect because he did not like the design,” by Steve White in the Mirror.

The other day Kim and his wife toured the new facility, expected to open this week. Not many people probably noticed the absence of the architect from Kim’s entourage. Ma was executed last November as part of a larger purge for “corrupt practices and failure to follow orders.” Here is a statement that contains Kim’s indictment of the design:

“Defects were manifested in the last phase of the construction of the Terminal 2 because the designers failed to bear in mind the party’s idea of architectural beauty that is the life and soul and core in architecture to preserve the character and national identity,” Kim said, according to NKNews’ transcript of a state media report.

This is not especially chilling only because it is North Korea. Who knows why the guy really had to hang at the end of a rope (or got a bullet in the base of the neck)? It is not the way architects, not even celebrity modernists, usually die in civilized nations.

Imagine if architects here could be executed for “failing to bear in mind the party’s idea of architectural beauty.” Who would “the party” be? The AIA?

In most countries, including America, architects would be at wit’s end to figure out how to avoid execution. They would have to rely on the ability of the “jury” to look deeply into the architect’s ego and measure his zeal to reach the apogee of novelty, rather than judging him according to some culturally determined and generally explicable set of design rules. Pity his lawyer! Figuring out a useful defense strategy for a modernist would be no easier than trying to figure out a rationale for the latest Pritzker Prize selection.

So, while most Americans would probably draw their fingers across their necks to signal their assignment of fate to the architects of their built environment, let us hope it never comes to pass literally, as it seems to have done in Pyongyang.