When Donald Powers Architects Inc. is awarded a large design and planning contract, it is almost certain that the company will bring in another firm or two to help. That’s the ethos of New Urbanism, President and Principal Donald W. Powers said.
“Contrary to the way most architecture firms work – they tend to be competitive and insular – the alliance of people around New Urbanism tends to refer work to one another,” Powers said. “They bring each other in, working under the philosophy that more hands are better than fewer.”
He added, “The idea is that places historically was made over lots of little increments by many different hands. If one person were doing the whole thing, they can’t possibly do it as interestingly and subtly as a lot of people contributing can.”
And along with being an office philosophy, working collaboratively with firms that Powers has connected with through the Congress of New Urbanism group has also proved to be a strong business model. The firm has been brought into projects around the country and in just nine years has been able to expand its national practice.
DPA is now working on New Urbanism projects – part of a movement focused on cutting urban sprawl – in South Carolina, Virginia, Washington and Arkansas.
“But it’s two pronged, because we’ve also been able to establish a reputation locally in the world of affordable housing and community planning,” Powers said, adding, “It’s been a productive arrangement because locally, when people find out we’re known nationally, it raises our status as well.”
After earning a master’s in architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design in 1992, Powers started out in the industry in Boston. He found that he wasn’t suited to peddling ultra-modern designs.
“I was working for large, well-known firms, doing a lot of high-profile commissions,” he said. “And I slowly came to the realization that the last thing the world needed was another new library for the Taft Prep School. My sense was that the problem in our built environment was more in the suburbs, on the strips, in the low quality of our housing.”
So Powers, who grew up in Barrington, came back to Rhode Island. In 2000, when he founded his firm, he was intent on fighting sprawl “without any credentials to do so. … I put it sort of jokingly on our Web site that our mission is to save the world from sprawl.”
And the firm’s designs are more focused toward “competency” and “responsibility,” but not always originality. “That’s a really strong point that I make in the office,” Powers said. “We’re not focused on being the Frank Geary of our community, being recognized for being virtuoso designers.”
It’s not that DPA and Powers dislike modern design, such as the new buildings that have been added to the Capital Center district. “But what I do push back against is the kind of modern planning that’s lost the subtly of how buildings cooperate with each other to make a public” space, Powers said.
Now, the firm is working on a range of projects, from the redesign of several underutilized buildings and lots in Providence’s Smith Hill neighborhood to the design of a new, walkable housing community near East Greenwich’s Main Street. The East Greenwich project is set to break ground this year.
And focusing on both local and national projects has proved to be as fulfilling as Powers had hoped when he came back to Rhode Island nine years ago.
“It’s been a very satisfying way to work, to be firmly grounded in the community, but to also be able to work on the kinds of stuff that we do around the country,” Powers said. “But to boil it down, what we’re really interested in as a firm is making a civic contribution.”
And that’s the firm’s main pitch, Powers said. When it was recently awarded the contract for a new Tiverton library, the firm beat out competitors that are library-specialized designers. “In fact, it was the specialization that stopped good firms from really considering all of the ramifications of what it means to build a new library for a town,” Powers said, “and connect it with the community.” •
COMPANY PROFILE
Donald Powers
Architects Inc.
Owner: Donald Powers
(Douglas Kallfelz is a partner)
Type of Business: Architecture and planning firm
Location: 140 Union St., Providence
Employees: 13, including partners
Year Established: 2000
Annual Sales: About $1.7 million
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