Proposed garage at South Street Landing, in Providence. (gcpvd.org)
The proposed garage above is part of a project that is to feature a Rhode Island state nursing school housed in a Beaux-Arts former electric plant. South Street Landing, as the project is known, will also have offices for Brown University, housed supposedly in the old electric plant, and a dormitory that will also be newly built, apparently of a design quite as appalling as the garage above.
South Street Power Station. (providencedailydose.com)
Power station design in earlier rehab project. (interactives.wpri.com)
Why the state and Brown have not proposed a garage and dormitory that would fit into a lovely setting already created by the electric plant is a question that boggles the mind. One of the very few competitive advantages Rhode Island can boast of is its beauty – and yet it keeps fostering a modernist development strategy that has already eroded its beauty for decades.
More so than any other state, leaders in Rhode Island are close enough to the population to have an idea what it thinks. But nobody with power and authority in government or business here seems to care a fig for what the public thinks of their deteriorating built environment.
It is almost as if our leaders think that poking citizens in the eye with a stick will create jobs.
Go figure!
Dormitory, garage and nursing school, as envisioned, at South Street Landing project.. (gcpvd.org)
Architecture Here and There 
I look at this and ask – “Where am I?” – Architecture should not make one no longer recognize the place they know.
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The blog Greater City Providence reports the developer is asking to get out of having to put retail at the street level. Perhaps one benefit is that those few actually walking despite this discouragement of any street life will try to walk the resulting boring block so fast they won’t have time to notice the garage design. Neither will motorists who park inside the garage and won’t have to see it. Perhaps its clever way to further discourage transit use by having anyone coming to the project by bus (if any, no buses in either rendering) having to actually fully see what was built.
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Maybe it’s a clever way to do economic development without having to create jobs!
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If you eliminate street level retail, you create a ghost land…Boston knew this implicitly and created convergence….
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Driving on 95 toward Warren yesterday, I was saddened once again that my view toward College Hill was almost blocked by the mall. Coming around the curve to 195, I looked across town and was stunned by how the skyline is now dominated by PoMo buildings. I could not find the old classics anymore.
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No s#!+
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