New home for Brown med school

The glamour factor is not the same: Sparkling new buildings are exciting; they look modern and cutting edge; they can be custom-designed for the programs they will house.
But in this economy, it wasn’t going to happen. And a key part of Brown University’s ambitious life sciences initiatives, a roughly $69 million new Mind Brain Behavior Building, had become hugely controversial because it would require moving three historic properties, including the cherished Urban Environmental Laboratory, on Angell Street.
In the spring, Brown put that plan on hold. And late last month, just before commencement, the Brown Corporation – the university’s board of trustees – approved a whole new approach to that project: to renovate the Metcalf buildings complex, at a cost of about $42 million.
The new facility will give a big boost to a burgeoning research field at Brown, combining a new Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences with the Institute for Brain Science – which includes psychiatrists and neuroscientists but also engineers, computer scientists, and more – as well as a vision-research center and a magnetic-resonance facility.
Yet the biggest news from the trustees was the choice of a home for The Warren Alpert Medical School, to be funded with part of a $100 million gift pledged two years ago by The Warren Alpert Foundation.
The plan, as with the brain-science facility, had been to build new, and the project was a much-coveted prize. Instead, Brown is investing about $45 million to turn 222 Richmond St., a Providence office building that was one of seven properties Brown bought in October 2006, into the medical school’s new home.
“It fits perfectly,” said Dr. Edward J. Wing, dean of medicine and biological sciences. Brown spent two years comparing different spaces, including potential new buildings on available parcels, he noted, and the former jewelry factory, built in 1928, was spacious, very versatile, full of natural light, and “built like a fortress.”
And converting it, Wing noted, will cost about half as much as a new building – plus it can be done about a year sooner. Ellenzweig Associates Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., has been hired to do the design, and if all goes as planned, the trustees will approve the basic design in October, then detailed plans will be prepared, construction will begin next May, and the new school will be finished, “optimally” in August 2011. Brown already has a significant presence in the Jewelry District, both with its own properties and through Lifespan and Care New England-owned facilities where many Brown-affiliated researchers work. The university trustees have also hired a firm, Kliment Halsband Architects, of New York, to recommend standards for future development of that area, which both the city and the state are looking to turn into a biomedical hub.
“This is going to be a symbol of the new Providence,” Wing said. And being in the heart of the Jewelry District research cluster, he said, is “good symbolically but also functionally.”
The choice to be there, however, and not next to Rhode Island Hospital, was not made easily. Wing said Brown officials “thought about that a lot,” but they decided there was no need to be that close to the hospitals, because “ we think the future of medicine is going to be not as focused on inpatient care as it has been in the past, but more on outpatient care and public health. … So we thought it was more important to put the school in an area of research, in an area next to [the Program in Public Health, at 121 South Main St.] and in an area which is close to downtown Providence.”
Wing said the project will create about 150 construction jobs and about 30 permanent new jobs. It’s “very important for the morale of the students and faculty,” he added, and it will give “tremendous momentum” to efforts to strengthen Brown’s relationships with the hospitals.
Constance A. Howes, president and CEO of Women & Infants Hospital, said the very fact that the project is moving forward is important.
“With the Lifespan buildings, and Women & Infants, and the medical school, they’re bringing together brilliant minds,” she said, “and good things happen when people are put physically together. It’s very close to the new Rhode Island Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at Davol Square, and this is the path that we need to take to get out of this economic downturn.” &#8226