The sketch above really threw me for a loop a while back, during the evolution of the 257 Thayer St. project, when Gilbane Properties (or Development) gave the flawed original design to Union Studio Architects in downtown Providence. I visited the office, which is in the Peerless Building right across the alley from the Smith Building where I lived in 1999-2010. Don Powers, the firm’s founder and principal, and Bob Gilbane, who was also there, showed me, among other illustrations, a sketch of the Brook Street facade of the proposed building, which featured the entry to a courtyard between the Meeting Street and Euclid Avenue wings of the somewhat U-shaped building. This wow’d me even more than the building’s frontage on Thayer Street. Can you see what I mean?

I don’t know whether it’s the spare but elegant detailing of the two end pieces of the structure, or the porportions by which the two end pieces and the fenestration on each side relate to each other, or just that really great gateway, but … well, you can just feel its gentle but firm relationship not just to the street but to the city and its people.

Tomorrow readers of my column can view another sketch from the same set of the corner of the building at Thayer and Euclid. (Or they can click to my last post, “Gilbane politely objects.”) But right now you can go to the website of the 257 Thayer St. project and see a video that takes you around the building in its latest and, I assume, final incarnation. In my opinion it is less compelling than the initial Union Studio renderings, including especially the one above. But you be the judge.