Brown University’s Quiet Green. (Photo by RichardBenjamin.com)
This week marks 250 years since the General Assembly passed a charter to found Rhode Island College, as it was first called, in the town of Warren, where it was first located. With a change of place in 1770 and a change of name in 1804, it became Brown University. Brown was the sixth school founded in the Ivy League.
The Ivy League was unknown as such until talk of an athletic conference for the eight storied universities arose in the 1930s. Seven of their eight student newspapers ran a joint editorial calling for “an Ivy League in fact, not just the one in the minds of sportswriters.” Only the student newspaper at Brown refused to print it. The idea stuck anyway.
So most of the buildings at Brown that might make one think of the Ivy League, cloaked in a hoary Hedera helix or not, were up by the time the phrase Ivy League was coined. Brown still retains much of that Ivy ambiance, thanks to its excellent preservation program.
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About David Brussat
This blog was begun in 2009 as a feature of the Providence Journal, where I was on the editorial board and wrote a weekly column of architecture criticism for three decades. Architecture Here and There fights the style wars for classical architecture and against modern architecture, no holds barred.
History Press asked me to write and in August 2017 published my first book, "Lost Providence." I am now writing my second book.
My freelance writing on architecture and other topics addresses issues of design and culture locally and globally.
I am a member of the board of the New England chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, which bestowed an Arthur Ross Award on me in 2002.
I work from Providence, R.I., where I live with my wife Victoria, my son Billy and our cat Gato.
If you would like to employ my writing and editing to improve your work, please email me at my consultancy, dbrussat@gmail.com, or call 401.351.0457.
Testimonial: "Your work is so wonderful - you now enter my mind and write what I
would have written."
- Nikos Salingaros, mathematician at the University of Texas, architectural theorist and author of many books.
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