On a May morning earlier this year, about 25 architects from around the world headed into Providence’s Capital Center district by way of the downtown Amtrak station.
As Barbara Albert, an architect with Constantin Walsh-Lowe LLC, a consulting firm based in Jersey City, N.J., stepped out onto the street – in a spot overshadowed by the steelwork being put up for the new Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island tower – she wasn’t sure quite what to think. The train station was “brutal,” she recalled thinking. The unfinished construction in front of her wasn’t an attractive entrance to the city.
But after walking around the corner and west for a block, she said she found something else entirely: The Waterplace Park view of the new GTECH Corp. and Waterplace condominiums, with the backdrop of the brick-façade buildings that populate downtown. “We took a very short walk, a quick walk out and we were all of a sudden surrounded by this city,” she said. “It was a very, very nice first impression there. A good mix of new and old buildings …very inviting.”
Boston-based architect Al Spagnolo, a founding partner of Spagnolo Gisness & Associates Inc. and designer of the GTECH building, helped organize the architectural tour as part of the annual American Institute of Architects 2008 Convention, held in Boston. “This is one of the few tours that happened outside the Greater Boston area,” he said last week. “And it took some convincing.”
The event in Providence was only a daylong walkthrough, but it seems to have left at least a few strong impressions on the visitors.
The Providence tour was one of the highlights of the conference, said Simon Wells, principal of Simon A W Wells & Associates Pty Ltd in New South Wales, Australia, who spoke to Providence Business News last week from a rural town north of Sydney.
Much of his praise stemmed from the city’s historic architecture – both the preservation of it and it’s proximity to more modern designs. But the layout of the city – established before many of the current buildings were built – was also one of Providence’s strengths, he said.
“The town has lovely vistas and wherever you go, your eye is always led to an interesting site,” he said. “If you take a city grid, you’ll never see anything because it’s on the grid. But in Providence, because the streets are all slightly curved, you’ve always got something that takes you around the corner.”
Those views were orchestrated as part of a decades-long effort by the Capital Center Commission, an agency formed during the 1980s. “There had been people at that time who were looking to reunite the Statehouse area with the downtown, which was then separated by train tracks and parking lots,” CCC Executive Director Deborah Merlino-Winder said.
During the tour, Leslie Gardner, the group’s chairman, detailed CCC’s effort to create a city-planning foundation – complete with view and height restrictions – for the city’s Capital Center district. That plan includes leaving sightlines to the Statehouse, she said, but they didn’t include any specific architectural styles for Capital Center developments.
“We felt it was extremely important that we began to look outside our [current designs] and we were receptive to new ideas,” Gardner said last week. “We encourage. We never design, just react.”
Frank Salas, an architect with CSR Associates PA in Nutley, N.J., praised that work last week. Much of his firm’s work is for buildings in Newark, New Jersey, and the surrounding towns, but there isn’t a “coherent vision” for many of those municipalities, he said. “I would say we’re doing more spot development and not really total-picture developments.”
Wells noted that the years of dormancy in Providence – before it earned the moniker of “The Renaissance City” – seem to have allowed it to skip the period during the 1980s and 1990s when many historic buildings in other cities were knocked down.
Albert, who does much of her work in the New York metro region, agreed. “Over time, it’s like all the stars have aligned for Providence,” she said, adding that there’s just the right mix of “people with great ideas and the knowledge and technical skills, but you also have the financing and government support.”
The GTECH building, which is largely covered with glass curtain wall, is a positive change for Providence architecture, she added.
Wells agreed, but warned that architects going forward in the capital city should be conscious to not create too many modern buildings.
“I think that you can build very modern buildings, but if you put 30 modern buildings together, people will say that’s a modern little city,” he said.
But Wells liked the high-quality “interaction” between the new and the old. “It fits in very well because it is so out there and in-your-face, but it’s proportionately hectic” compared to its surroundings.
Boston’s Spagnolo, who grew up in Federal Hill, was well aware of the “Providence of the past” when he designed the building.
“And what I heard, over and over again, including from the Providence Preservation Society, is that the city needed a building that was forward-looking,” he said. “They wanted architecture that didn’t detract from the historic past of Providence.”
Wells also offered a few suggestions for Providence, including making some small changes to Providence Place mall. “I wonder if the Providence Place mall could be opened up along the Francis Street façade on various levels to interact with this space,” he wrote in his notes about the tour, “as some terraces with cafés and restaurants would just be the icing on the cake.”
And Albert, the architect from New Jersey, only had one real critique of the city’s layout – not enough “pocket parks” or “shaded benches” to sit down in the financial and downtown areas. But, if and when residents are attracted to the area, that might change, she said.
“Residential, that’s the one thing that’s missing,” she said. “But as people move into downtown, [the façades and architecture] are a part of what’s going to make them excited about being there. It’s not only the amenities – like coffee shops and bistros – but the beauty and the richness of the environment.” •
