Christopher Gray’s legacy

Posted on April 25, 2024 by David Brussat

This building is reprinted on the promotional material for next Thursday’s lecture. (OMH)

Christopher Gray was my favorite Timesman, which is news speak for reporter at the New York Times. (I’ll admit, that’s a low bar, these days at least.) I didn’t read him often because I don’t get the Times, but when I did come across his work, he always covered a building like white on rice – a simile I don’t quite understand, but let it go. Gray would dig into the history of a building such as the one illustrated above and tell us its history of ownership, when and for what purposes it was built, who had purchased it over the years, and what its current status was – newly renovated or newly demolished. These sound like relatively boring tidbits for all but the most die-hard buildingologist, but Gray would always manage to infuse them with meaning and delight.

Alas, Gray passed away on March 10, 2017, and has been sorely missed ever since.

The organization concerned with preserving Manhattan’s Upper West Side, LandmarkWest!, will host, next Thursday at 6 p.m., a Zoom lecture by Sam Hightower, current director of Gray’s library of building history, the Office for Metropolitan History. (Click on link to reserve your $6 ticket.) OMH sounds a little bit too much, for my taste, like OMA – the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, founded by the übermodernist architect Rem Koolhaas – but let that pass as well.

Andra Moss, who wrote the press material for the upcoming lecture, reveals that Gray has been replaced in writing Gray’s column at the Times by John Freeman Gill. I will have to check that out. Online. (Any relation to The New Yorker’s famous writer Brendan Gill?)

Hightower plans to take attendees through the OMH collection compiled by Gray during his 28 years writing the “Streetscapes” column in the real-estate section of the Times. He will “shed light on the research methods undergirding [Gray’s] work, highlight gems in the OMH’s private archive, and discuss the never-ending evolution of New York City’s built environment.” It seems that Gray was let go by the Gray Lady (no relation, and it would not apply anymore, anyway) in December 2014, about three months after I was let go by the Providence Journal. But let that go, so to speak, as well.

I wonder whether Hightower plans to refer to the “never-ending evolution” of the city as a devolution, indeed as a degeneration. A tedious gray box by OMA would fit in well on the streetscapes of today’s Manhattan. It is important to keep in mind that today’s city retains more, many more, than a handful of beautiful buildings of great historical significance. Too bad so many have been lost, and that those that remain are so regrettably swamped by stuff of much poorer quality.

So: 6 p.m. next Thursday evening (Office for Metropolitan History). Be there or be a glass box.

Posted in Architecture, Architecture History | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Architecture of community

Posted on April 15, 2024 by David Brussat

Drawing by Leon Krier.

Below is the foreward to Léon Krier’s book The Architecture of Community (2009), which I posted on my blog in 2020. Born in Luxembourg, Krier, is, of course, among the foremost thinkers about architecture and city planning. Above his foreward I posted my favorite from his collection of drawings that illustrate principles via the conundrums faced by architects and city planners. Here is the foreward to Krier’s masterful volume:

***

Recently, a delegation of developers and planners from Shanghai and Singapore visited Poundbury, the new town I have been master-planning for HRH Prince Charles since 1988 in Dorset, England.

After my presentation, a representative from the Chinese delegation came to me, saying. “You must come to China. We want Poundbury in Shanghai.” I responded that for his country I would of course design a Chinese not an English town. “No, no,” he cut in, “we want English Poundbury. It will have much success.” When I replied that it would be as unsuitable as planting a palm tree in the Siberian tundra, the gentleman shook his head and walked away. After him the delegate of Singapore addressed me: “Mr. Krier,” he said, you must come to Singapore. We want Poundbury with skyscrapers.” When he understood that my skyscrapers would have no more than three to five floors, he too frowned in disbelief and turned on his heel.

This is to say that the present book is not about exoticism, not about the brief thrill of consuming imported alien products, not about promoting trendy European goods for globalized markets, cultures and climates.

The Architecture of Community is about something more fundamental. It is about re-establishing our own traditional forms and techniques of building and settling. The devastation of the traditional Chinese building heritage is causing headlines worldwide. Yet I am less alarmed by the loss of material than by the loss of the ideas which generated and perpetuated it for thousands of years. I am not merely talking about saving historic buildings and towns but saving the technology which created and sustained those forms, made them to be desirable and to be emulated for hundreds of generations. I am suggesting that architects and planners become primordially concerned, not with the historicity of traditional architecture and urbanism but with their technology, with the techniques of building settlements in a specific geographic location with its natural materials.

It is tragic that more and more intelligent minds should at once be spellbound by that undecipherable Spirit of the Age (Zeitgeist) and so indifferent to the Spirit of Place (Genius Loci), the conditions of nature, of local climate, topography, soil, customs, all of them phenomena objectively apprehensible in their physical and chemical qualities.

This book advocates not to respect, study and use traditional ideas because they are historical, but where and when they are relevant for us the living, essential for our well-being. They are repositories not merely of humanity, but of humaneness and ecology.

Human scale, as we now discover when too many of our built environs have lost it, is an unrenounceable attribute of civilization, not an obsolete luxury. We demonstrate here, by vision and example, how human scale can become again the yardstick of modern artifacts, adequate for our bodies and souls, for both our limited physiological capacities and our infinite desires, be they tools, buildings, cities or landscapes.

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Radiant Garden City Beautiful

Posted on March 30, 2024 by David Brussat

Court of Honor at center of World’s Columbian Exposition, in Chicago, 1893.

Henry Hope Reed, who wrote The Golden City in 1959 and led the opposition to modern architecture in the mid-20th century and helped to found the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art in 1968 (originally called Classical America), was not totally infallable. In his exaltation of Greco-Roman classical styles, he fell into an ill-fated opposition to Gothic and other styles that were opposed by architects in the previous two or three centuries. This was a mistake, and it somewhat undermined his strength in arguing for tradition as the basis for architectural style. So imagine how I must have felt when I stumbled on this post of mine from 2014:

***

Radiant Garden City Beautiful

If wizards like Henry Hope Reed can be wrong on occasion, so can Jane Jacobs, who in our era is even more famous for her own pathbreaking 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Its chief claim to fame is to have thrown the active life of the best city streets into the face of the city-deadly megaprojects of Robert Moses, king of development in New York for almost half a century.

Jacobs spends some time toward the beginning of her book describing the horror brought to cities by the ideas of Le Corbusier and his book, The Radiant City. (We do not marvel at the mistakes of Corbu – he got everything wrong.) This was the idea that city streets were bad and should be replaced by towers in a park. In 1925 he proposed razing central Paris to carry out his totalitarian idea. She then describes the Garden City movement, originating in Britain, which was basically the idea that cities were bad and should be replaced by, in essence, suburbs. She combines these concepts into what she calls the Radiant Garden City, a catchall for bad ideas. How convenient.

But then she ropes in another concept, one that was basically flawless, of which Henry Reed was a strong proponent – the City Beautiful movement. Jacobs exaggerates and misconstrues it, referring to the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 as “a sort of squat, decorated forecast of Le Corbusier’s later repetitive ranks of towers in a park.” She notes that it fizzled stylistically but that its core concept of the “Monumental Center” remained, leading to America’s great civic plazas, which Jacobs did not really appreciate because she saw them as countervailing her preferred animated small streets of many shops and eyes looking out from windows. This is indeed a powerful concept – one that Moses sought to eradicate and replace with the Radiant City model – but Jacobs was mistaken, I think, in believing that a great city could not have both her animated street life and a monumental city plaza or two with a sort of Benjamin Franklin Parkway-like monumental boulevard linking them together.

Anyway, I wonder whether Jacobs was compelled to rope the City Beautiful into her catalogue of woes by the elegance and charm and wit of the phrase she invented to combine them into a single monolithic pox of modern planning on all houses. Here is that passage:

The architecture of the City Beautiful centers went out of style. But the idea behind the centers was not questioned, and it has never had more force than it does today [1961]. The idea of sorting out certain cultural or public functions and decontaminating their relationship with the workaday city dovetailed nicely with the Garden City teachings. The conceptions have harmoniously merged, much as the Garden City and the Radiant City merged, into a sort of Radiant Garden City Beautiful[.]”

I suspect that as a lively writer Jacobs was so captivated by the phrase Radiant Garden City Beautiful that she twisted the last part into something more awful than she knew to be the case. Or maybe not. Still, the excitement of words can sometimes get in the way of the excitement of ideas. Maybe this is one example of that.

By the way, the World’s Columbian Exposition had over 27 million visitors over a period of six months, which was almost half the 63 million population of the United States at the time, and they could not get to Chicago anywhere near as easily as we can today. On one day over 700,000 visitors attended. In terms of “animated streets,” it would be hard for Jane Jacobs to argue with those numbers.

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Rebuild Key Bridge as it was

Posted on March 27, 2024 by David Brussat

Key Bridge before it was struck by a huge freighter in March 2024. (William Sherman:Getty Images)

President Biden has said he will rebuild the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge, over the Papatsco River leading into the Port of Baltimore, at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. The bridge, completed in 1977, was hit by a freighter that lost its steering on Monday night. As of this writing, six men filling potholes on the bridge are still missing and, sadly, presumed dead. The Key was a queen of the art of infrastructure, a demonstration that utility can be beautiful. And so the president should see that it is rebuilt, as it was, to teach that very lesson.

As we all know by now, the bridge is named for Francis Scott Key, who wrote the words to what became our national anthem after seeing that our flag still flew after the failed British assault on Fort McHenry, in Baltimore Harbor, leading to the end of the War of 1812.

Curiously, the Key Bridge, 1.6 miles in length (not including some nine miles of access roads), reaching a height of 185 feet,  was built to take the overflow from the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel after the latter had reached its traffic capacity. The tunnel was completed in 1957, the bridge in 1977. The bridge cost $66 million, has four lanes, to the tunnel’s two. Now it is gone, and while vehicles, including freight-hauling megatrucks, still have alternative routes in and around Baltimore. The Port of Baltimore handled 847,158 cars and light trucks last year, leading all other ports in the nation for 13 consecutive years. Cargo ships, which of course carry far more than the most humongous of trucks, will not be able to travel in or out of the harbor for many months, probably years.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttegieg, no doubt repeating the magnificent phrase of some rhetorician long past, referred to the Key Bridge as “a cathedral of infrastructure.” That no doubt it was.

Examine the interplay of the bridge’s steel strutwork. The intricacy of its design undermines the idea that modern structure needs to be ugly. The collapse of the bridge shocked the civil engineering community, for which its design is iconic. It is the second-longest continuous-truss bridge in the United States, the third-longest in the world. The longest is the Ikitsuki Bridge, in Japan. (A truss, in engineering, is a structure whose “members are organized so that the assemblage as a whole behaves as a single object”).

Its beautiful intricacy belies its strength, and speaks to that quality vis-á-vis beauty and commodity in the famous Vitruvian triad of utilitas, firmitas and venustas (stability, usefulness, and beauty). The bridge’s firmitas withstood the stress of its utilitas – all that traffic! all those huge mack trucks thumping along its tired pavement – until three days after its 57th anniversary. Its beauty, venustas, may have been an afterthought, but it will be in the memories of all who mourn the bridge’s loss.

Engineers have been designing beautiful bridges of iron and steel for more than a century and a half. I have seen no mention in any of what I’ve read to source this post of the designer of either the bridge below (Abraham Darby?) or of the Key Bridge itself.

Key Bridge failed yesterday after suffering the massive affront of a massive cargo ship, but that does not diminish the beauty of its glorious infrastructure – which should be rebuilt to its historic design by the Biden administration.

The Iron Bridge at Colebrookdale, 1780, by William Williams. (Mutual Art)

Posted in Architecture, Art and design | Tagged , , , , | 17 Comments

Providence Place: Still alive

Posted on March 16, 2024 by David Brussat

Providence Place glimpsed between buildings in downtown Providence. (Photo by author)

I don’t have any deep inside knowledge (or shallow inside knowledge) of whether the downtown mall in my town, Providence Place, is going down the tubes soon. Still, my friend Will Morgan, who is also a local architecture critic, a rival of sorts, thinks it is, or thinks it might be. So, since I have a sentimental attachment to the thing, I wrote a reply to his piece on the GoLocalProv website. Here it is, with some minor changes:

***

Overall a very nice piece, Will. I agree that the mall has been through some shaky times, including new shops that are dubious. How many additional shoe stores are enough? Agreed! But some errors remain.

I think Adrian Smith’s early classical design (see way below) for the mall, circa 1994, was simply jettisoned in toto after Gov.-elect Almond came in the next year, with St. Florian starting afresh. The original anchors were Filene’s and Nordstrom. Lord & Taylor opened to the rear of the middle. I believe it came in a year or so after the 1999 opening. When it closed it was replaced by more parking.

Fane Tower, as I suspect you are aware, was proposed long after the Burj Dubai was completed. Adrian Smith had suggested a dome on his version of the mall, which was replaced by St. Florian’s Wintergarden, which along with his rooftop skylights spread considerable light into the mall’s shopping areas. That elegant flourish, the skybridge from the Westin, was not added until quite a bit later.

The Providence Arcade of 1828 was not the nation’s first indoor mall but its oldest surviving mall. The New York Arcade and the Philadelphia Arcade opened about a year earlier. Not sure which opened first. One of the two did not last long, the other lasted late into the 19th century, and possibly into the next. They were both modeled after the then recently opened Burlington Arcade, in London, which is alive and kicking, to say the least. Here in Rhode Island, there was an arcade that opened before 1828 somewhere north of Providence, but I don’t know its name, its appearance, or its town of location. It didn’t last long.

I think the design of our mall, whether St. Florian or the anchor architects, is relatively charming. Aspects of it – such as the Filene’s curve, when its lights are on (rarely, it seems) – are quite charming. Stacked against the typical suburban mall, ours is much better. But it is far from perfect. Nobody would fly to Europe to see it. Its exterior features tend to be clunky. Indoors it lacks the traditional detailing you’d expect when looking at it from the outside. This is an obvious design flaw and St. Florian needs to hang his head in shame. But then, how could he possibly look his fellow modernists in the eye if he had not modernized the interior to apologize for classicizing the exterior?

I think your ideas for what to do with the mall if it closes are a form of surrendering in advance. Its managers should continue to try to run it as a shopping emporium, perhaps with bits devoted to other ideas. Victoria, Billy and I occasionally go to a movie there, and sometimes even shop or dine, and we have never felt unsafe, or lonely. If only it had a book shop. (Victoria worked at the Borders there until she was pregnant, and before it absquatulated.)

One bright spot is that if you watch the groups of kids, you will see the racial integration the powers that be have long wanted to force on the schools taking place au naturel in the mall. Hurray! The mall is not all gang fights, and in spite of the mall (or because of it) downtown has survived the pandemic and is reasonably vibrant. Lots of new restaurants have opened. I had lunch at Ellie’s last Thursday with Buff Chace – who has led downtown’s revival with his lofts above ground-floor shopping – and he is still trying to start new projects downtown.

I think today I am closer to supporting your position that the mall stores should have been installed behind the façades of Westminster Street. I seem to recall a D.C. developer called Federated that came to Providence hoping to do that. But that was simply not going to happen. Too bad, I’d say. Buff  and others opposed the mall worked hard to try to make something else happen, but without success. Or perhaps something else did happen, and it is working!

I’m sure you have your ear closer to the ground than I do, Will, but I have not heard that Providence Place is about to be shut down. What are you hearing? (Will replied that he had heard nothing.)

Adrian Smith’s design for Providence Place, circa 1994, was highly classical, a rebuke to the conventional wisdom. (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill)

Detail of Adrian Smith’s design for Providence Place, circa 1994, before Friedrich St. Florian was called in by Gov. Lincoln Almond to design final concept. (SOM)

Providence place sits proudly amid its downtown neighborhood. (View from Governor’s Balcony, circa 2006; photo by author)

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Wake up, Little Compton

Posted on March 8, 2024 by David Brussat

Adeline Slicer House (1887) still looks about the same as in 2003. (Photo by David Brussat.)

Little Compton’s town council will soon receive advice from this corner that was good when originally delivered in 2003, in my Journal column of Aug. 28 of that year as part of my “Outside Providence” series. The series looked at efforts in the other 38 cities and towns to maintain their historical character. Dr. Ara Sadaniantz asked me to offer the council advice on whether to adopt a proposed historic district for the Commons, along with a regime for rewarding good stewardship with plaques. I have done so, but since Little Compton is about as lovely as it has always been, my advice has not changed much since 2003. Below is a reprint of that ancient column. The photo at the top is of the same house more than 20 years later.

***

Wake up, Little Compton, wake up!

LITTLE COMPTON

Tracking down the origin of the name of the town of Little Compton on Tuesday evening took me even longer than driving there on Monday morning. Notes on Little Compton (1970), by Franklin Wilbour, was delightful but not helpful. Nor was the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage commission’s excellent 1990 survey of the town.

The Wilbour book does note that, in 1682, the General Court, in Plymouth, “graunted” that the place “shall from this time be a township, and have the liberties of a towne as other townes of this colonie and shall be called by the name of Little Compton.” But why? No reason is suggested.

Picturesque Rhode Island (1881), by Wilfred Munro, notes that Little Compton “probably took its name from Little Compton of Oxfordshire, England.” But the Encyclopaedia Britannica describes Oxfordshire as landlocked, and its long entry mentions no Little Compton. There is no separate entry for “Little Compton,” and the only entry under “Compton” is for a city in California. Founded in 1868, Compton’s 2000 population was 93,493 – 26 times that of Little Compton, which was 3,593.

Before its name was pulled out of the cocked hat of a magistrate in Plymouth, Little Compton was called Saconet, or Sagkonate – after the tribe led by Awashonks, queen sachem of the Sakonnets, a branch of the Wampanoag. It has since been known as Seaconnet, Saconnet, Sakonnet and, quaintly by the late Journal columnist David Patten, S’cunnet.

An irresistibly quaint bit of history is that Little Compton’s rights and privileges as a township had already been “graunted” by Plymouth in 1674, but nobody in Saconet realized it. This might be because King Philip’s War intervened in 1675. The war was won almost single-handedly by Capt. Benjamin Church (according to his diary). He was the first and possibly the only white inhabitant of Saconet to settle there before the war. He convinced Awashonks, of the Sakonnets, to break with King Philip, aka Metacomet, the Wampanoag sachem; he then led the force that tracked Philip down and killed him. (History suggests that Church’s diary did not exaggerate by much.) After the war, Church settled in Bristol but eventually returned to Little Compton. His descendants have since been ubiquitous in the town annals.

After 1663, Little Compton was claimed by both Plymouth and Rhode Island. But Little Compton favored Little Rhody. Twice in its early years, the town rejected Puritan civil authority. In 1683, it refused to pay a tax to support a minister. Ditto in 1692 – and to avoid the tax, it plotted to join Rhode Island. In both cases, Little Compton was brought to heel.

Still, the die was cast, and in 1746/1747 (the calendar changed from Julian to Gregorian that year), Little Compton became (with Warren) the 22nd (or 23rd) Rhode Island jurisdiction. Little has changed since then, and to this day little happens in town affairs that does not amount to resisting change.

My impression of Little Compton as a paragon of quaintness, a New England seacoast village preserved in amber, was only reinforced by my tour Monday with two leading citizens, Larry Anderson, of the Sakonnet Preservation Association, and Helen Bridge, of the Little Compton Historical Society.

Little Compton’s remoteness helped it to resist change, to remain lovely and wistful – “like the places one goes to on the way to sleep,” wrote Sarah Orne Jewett. In 1869, the Providence poet Sara Helen Whitman noted that “to journey by steamboat from Providence to Little Compton takes more time than it does to go by railroad to New York.” In 1886, as increasing numbers of wealthy summer residents arrived, Sarah Soule Wilbour noted, “I don’t think it adds to our happiness to have many city ways and fashions brought among us.”

This remains the town attitude, and attitude is the only force holding back the tide of modernity and its chief physical threat, modern architecture.

For a century, summer residents built summer houses that protected Little Compton’s charm. Most still do. But when, at last, the Thomas Marvell House (1940) reared its ugly head, the obstinate Yankees who have run the town refused to pass laws to protect Little Compton from modern architecture. To this day, only the town common, one house and the Sakonnet Point Light are on the National Register of Historic Places. The town has two monuments to the Rhode Island Red, but not a lick of historic-district zoning.

So attitude remains the only bulwark against modernism. One modernist house in plain view is derided as the “Third World Airport.” That’s the spirit! Most out-of-towners with modernist designs deflect scorn by building their clunkers out of view.

But this is changing. Precisely because change has come so slowly to Little Compton, the town will be surprised by how fast change can arrive. Modernity kills charm little by little, insidiously, like poison. Before anyone notices, it will be too late. Little Compton won’t look like Little Compton anymore.

Wake up, Little Compton, or else the place you go to on the way to sleep will be a nightmare.

Posted in Architecture, Blast from past, Preservation | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Save Pawtucket’s Ott Mansion

Posted on February 10, 2024 by David Brussat

The Read-Ott Mansion, 97 Walcott St., Quality Hill, Pawtucket, R.I.

The headline of this post is the same as when I wrote it as my weekly column for the Providence Journal in 2008. The Read-Ott Mansion was at a most dire risk of demolition then, and remains so now. Its owner, the Assumption of the Virgin Mary Greek Orthodox Church of Pawtucket, is about to tear it down. True, it has had another 16 years of grace. In the name of the Virgin Mary, the church should cease and desist. Here is the conclusion of critic Will Morgan’s recent GoLocalProv piece, with more illustrations:

Sadly, this is a typical story. Likely too late now, alas, but one can imagine the house being repurposed for housing or some other income-producing solution for the church–a hospice, a Greek language school, apartments for parishioners? There would still be plenty of open space around the church for future expansion, such as a parish house, without letting the Read-Ott house disappear. One can empathize with the costs of supporting a congregation and maintaining its real estate in a city that is a ghost of its once hugely prosperous self. Nevertheless, this a loss that should not have happened.

I hope that Morgan is excessively pessimistic. I have, I think, demonstrated my credentials as the most optimistic of optimists. May the Read-Ott continue to grace Quality Hill. With apologies for any facts that may have been overtaken by events since I wrote 16 years ago, here is my exercise in optimism:

***

Save Pawtucket’s Ott Mansion

The Read-Ott Mansion has been for decades the prize possession of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary Greek Orthodox Church, on Walcott Street at the gateway to Pawtucket’s Quality Hill neighborhood. Walcott is still Pawtucket’s Benefit Street (it actually has its own street of the same name) as Quality Hill was Pawtucket’s College Hill before Oak Hill nudged it aside after its century on top – or so some might attest. Bar fights no doubt still break out between Bucketeers who stand up for one or the other as the city’s finest neighborhood. (We tend to forget how wealthy Pawtucket was back in the day.)

But I’d wager that no house in Oak Hill can match the Read-Ott Mansion for twists in architectural history. The house was built by tinsmith-turned-hardware merchant John Blake Read in 1842. The columns originally upholding the pedimental roof of its porch declared it a Greek Revival. In 1850, Read added bay windows over the door and a cupola on the roof that transformed his house (in the eyes of future architectural historians) into one of Italianate style.

By 1890 its ownership had gone from Read to Darious Goff to Joseph Ott, founder of the Royal Weaving Co. For Ott, an Italianate Greek Revival in a very fashionable district was not quite house enough. In 1915, working with architect W.G. Sheldon, he lopped off the cupola and added a third story and colonial details. In 1930, the Ionic porch was enclosed and an imposing Doric portico rising two stories was added. This turned the house into a Georgian Revival, according to the architectural historians, although my own research has not yet uncovered the point at which the house came to called a mansion.

In the early 1960s, Pawtucket’s Greek Orthodox congregation was evicted by “urban removal” from its George Street church to make way for Route 95. The congregation bought the house on Walcott. Next to it they built a new church in a St. George-meets-George Jetson style. It opened in 1967.

The Read-Ott served as the congregation’s parish house. Its interior was renovated in the ’70s with features that call to mind loud shirts, fat ties and wide lapels. To judge by its situation today, the effect may have been to doom its allure to the congregation. In any event, the new fire code has recently made any use illegal pending an upgrade to unrealistic standards.

Historical preservationists may pull their chins in quest of the correct point in time to restore it to. Neo-Georgian? Italianate? Greek Revival? The congregation simply wants to fix it up or tear it down. The latter option should, of course, be considered a last resort. At $80,000, it would be the cheapest. Yet the property is insured, unburdened by a mortgage, and thus about $2.5 million is available, more than needed to meet the fire code, restore it to a high standard and/or renovate it for most purposes.

The building has great bones – the structure is sound and the exterior remains enchanting, akin to Bristol’s Linden Place in potential for beauty. Inside, the errata of the 1970s are easily removed. They include wall-to-wall shag carpeting and, in the parlor, an odd, space-age staircase banister whose struts (you can hardly call them balusters!) jut at a 90 degree angle from the crook of every third riser. These have gotta go! Luckily, most of the Georgian details remain, including the lovely banisters on stairways in the less prominent parts of the house that might not have warranted the honor of modernization.

Joan Milas, a congregation member and well-regarded Smith Hill lobbyist leading the preservation effort, promises to rename it the Read-Ott-Brussat Mansion if this column attracts a millionaire’s attention. [Evidently it did not – db] But if an angel appears, shouldn’t it be named, say, the Read-Ott-Gates Mansion?

In addition to twisting the arm of this reporter to go to bat for the Read-Ott Mansion, Milas has, among other heroic accomplishments, gently cajoled free advice from local experts in the fields of architecture and historic preservation.

One idea generated thus far is for a senior center for the elderly members of various nearby Orthodox congregations. That would stroke the sense of communal benevolence. A more public use could be as an art museum, which might assuage the loss of the Pawtucket Children’s Museum, which left the Pitcher-Goff Mansion (also on Walcott Street) for Providence in 1997. This would burnish Pawtucket’s reputation as an arts mecca, one-upping archrival Providence, which let the Rhode Island School of Design use “art” [with its RISD Art Museum addition] to attack the beauty of its host city.

However it is used, the Read-Ott Mansion ought to be saved. To raze it would be shameful.

Posted in Architecture, Architecture History, Preservation, Rhode Island | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Best trad buildings of 2023

Posted on January 26, 2024 by David Brussat

Who can identify this city? It appears at minute 4:40 in the video linked below. (CPI)

It is past time for my annual roundup of best buildings from 2023. I confess, the time blew right past me. Maybe it is not too late now, but I am too busy (and lazy) to wrap it all up again for last year. Instead, I offer a video that should help to promote a best-building culture around the world. Once you’ve viewed it you will thank me for not inflicting on you another year of “best trad.” The video is from the the online platform The Aesthetic City, and is entitled “Build Like This Again?,” produced and narrated by Ruben Hanssen, founder of the platform. Click on that link. The link does not take you directly to the video, but to “Home.” Maybe that is my fault. You might have to scroll down a bit until you reach “Our Videos,” and click on the first of these, “Build Like This Again?” If you can find the online magazine again (I could not), you can read an interview Hanssen gives at the bottom. The one before it is excellent as well. All of this springs, in some way, from Michael Diamant and his New Traditional Buildings blog, and Nir Buras and his Classic Planning Institute, which is listed under “Other Initiatives.” There is much of value to read in this online magazine. If you can find it.

Enjoy. And enjoy your year, even without “Best Buildings of 2023.”

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Gaza as we’ve never seen it

Posted on January 15, 2024 by David Brussat

Destruction in Gaza, a place Palestinians cannot enjoy and cannot escape. (Reuters)

I occasionally devote a blog to cities devastated by war or natural disaster, showing how beautiful the place used to be (and to some extent may still be) as disaster consumes its ancient buildings. In most cases, the allure of places such as Beirut and Lviv, in Ukraine, is often well known by Western publics. Not so with Gaza, controlled by the terror group Hamas. Our mind’s eye – myself included – is taught to believe that Gaza is a hellhole and has been since the Israelis pulled out in 2005 (which is conveniently forgotten) – and of course now it is a hellhole, since bombing by the Israeli IDF has reduced much of it to rubble.

The video linked below is produced by the invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute. It will be an eye opener for most who have the courage to view it. MEMRI is devoted to exposing the lies that appear in most of the Middle Eastern media, which, alas, often includes mainstream Western media outlets, which have drunk the Kool Aid of Palestinian propaganda to the dregs. The propaganda asserts that Gaza is “occupied” by Israel, or that it is some sort of “concentration camp” from which Palestinians cannot escape. None of it is true. Here is the evidence:

https://www.memri.org/reports/parts-i-iv-face-suffocating-occupation-humanitarian-disaster-concentration-camp-and-prison

I cannot vouch for the architecture on display in pre-war Gaza. But I do believe that there is some sort of mental convergence between those who support modern architecture and those who support Hamas.

 

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Behold, NYC’s Tudor City

Posted on January 11, 2024 by David Brussat

Top levels, including roof terrace, of Windsor Tower, one of 13 in Tudor City. (Wikipedia)

I had lunch today (by now, yesterday) at Maven’s, a newly opened Jewish delicatessen in that plaza just off Hope Street as it becomes East Avenue, in Pawtucket. I’ve eaten there once before with my wife, Victoria – delicious, though not without some small kinks to be worked out – and this time I was by myself and talked with my table neighbor. We spoke of Manhattan, and he told me he’d once lived in Tudor City, near the United Nations complex. I said I was familiar with the name but not with its appearance. So when I got home I looked it up on Wikipedia.

I am no longer abashed to mention that. I’ve spent a lot of time in Wikipedia, since I’m writing a book and often need a quick refresher, or to double-check my fading memory. It has been criticized as not unbiased, but most of its articles on many subjects seem to be quite objective. I think that, as an architecture critic, I can be trusted to spot bias in articles with architectural content, such as its in-depth treatment of Tudor City. I saw none in this article. But there was a heavy bias, if you can call it that, for detail.

Thirteen separate buildings make up the complex, 12 of which were completed between 1927 and 1930; Tudor Gardens, the 13th, was finished in 1956. They sit between 41st and 43rds streets on land mainly of tenements and slums, which were demolished. It was farmland until the mid-1800s, part of acreage known as Turtle Bay Farm. The United Nations complex sits just to its east. Grand Central Terminal is to its west. Tudor City is the first residential skyscraper complex in Manhattan, and one of the first in the world. The heights of the 12 original buildings range from several of ten stories up to 32 stories for the Woodstock Tower, with 454 apartments. The original complex featured two large parks, though what their status is today I have no idea. Wikipedia describes the exterior design fully. Its features hark back to the Tudor and Elizabethen periods of England. My term for this sort of embellishment-heavy architectural description is “architecture porn.” This is a good example, though it is partial:

Generally, the lower stories of each building were clad in sandstone and limestone, while the upper stories were clad in reddish-brown brick with terracotta trim.[28] The complex’s designers used a broad range of Tudor Revival details, including towers, gables, parapets, balustrades, chimney stacks, oriels, bay windows, four centredarches,  pinnacles, quatrefoils, fish bladder moldings, Tudor roses, portcullises (a symbol of the Tudor sovereigns), and rampant lions carrying standards.

I have retained the links for readers’ pleasure and instruction. I wish there were a link for “fish bladder moldings.” And, alas, Wikipedia does not describe the decoration of the apartments, which could house up to 5,000 residents, many in studios, some with up to four or five bedrooms. The total population presumably includes those who stayed at the complex’s hotel, a separate building.

My familiarity withTudor City may be the result, exclusively, of its sign, reading “Tudor City,” atop Prospect Tower, which I’ve occasionally espied as I stroll along Manhattan’s streets on my occasional visits. Originally there were two signs; one was removed when it was blocked by another building, the company that owned Tudor City wanted to remove the second one as well. They were blocked by the landmarks commission – one of its few positive actions, in my recollection, though I probably don’t hear much about its no doubt many positive actions. I just hear about its mistakes, most of which are tremendously dissatisfying. Oh well, as they say, so it goes.

But I am happy to bring the Tudor City architecture porn to readers saddened by the declining pace of my posts.

View of two buildings in Tudor City, including one with its ubiquitous sign. (Wikipedia)

Posted in Architecture, Architecture History | Tagged , , , , , | 9 Comments