Look, Ma! No GTECH! … Other images of R.I.’s Amazon HQ2 pitch below. (CommerceRI)
When I saw the image above of Rhode Island’s pitch for Amazon’s HQ2, in today’s Providence Journal (“Envisioning Amazon’s HQ2 in heart of Capital Center“), I thought I imagined Deming Sherman’s head explode. But no, that was my head exploding.
Deming Sherman is the Capital Center Commission chairman who has defended Capital Center’s green spaces from proposals to build a new bus hub that would encroach on the State House lawn. He must have thought it was April 1 when he saw the newly released images of the HQ2 proposal. It does not encroach upon the State House lawn – it does not need to. It merely sledgehammers the whole place to smithereens.
Everybody knows that to the extent Providence is a delightful place with a bright future ahead, it is because the city is beautiful. In the 1960s it dodged the bullet of urban renewal. Since that time, it has preserved its historical character more faithfully and succumbed to fashion far less avidly than most other American cities. Yet virtually all current development proposals have embraced fashion, sashaying down the architectural runway decked out in egotecture designed not to be worn but to be flaunted as markers of ultimate municipal hip. Radical Chic in blueprints and T-squares. Tom Wolfe’s famous essay leaps to mind, with its Fifth Avenue society dames throwing parties for radical bomb-throwers. Not healthy.
The new CommerceRI HQ2 pitch images beat all, clogging downtown with stark and sterile towers that would drown out everything beautiful here, squelching our city’s human scale, blocking views of the State House and almost everything else we love, from almost every direction.
A stompathon.
Do Providence and Rhode Island have a death wish?
Architecture Here and There 
The renderings are an embarrassment!.. What baffles me is the Commerce Commission’s urban design illiteracy. Why would any state government permit a single corporate entity to physically dominate its statehouse? That’s nuts!… This vision makes the Albany Mall look like Harvard Square!… To your point David, we should be promoting our brand. This grease-ball land-grab approach damages it.
LikeLike
Agree on the weird renderings- just disconnected to Providence. But, what does “grease-ball”land grab refer to??
LikeLike
It refers to slippery doings. How else can this be justified?… Sorry if I sounded cryptic. : )
LikeLike
No fear. None of these renderings are even close to what will be if we – PROVIDENCE – win the bid.
LikeLike
You are right, Steve, they will surely be different if they do get built. Such drawings are not meant to be final versions of concepts. Still, however different, they are likely to be just as bad if not worse.
LikeLike
This looks to me like a sea of oil tanks all we need is the “Rainbow Swash” painted on the sides!
Very sad design ….
LikeLike
Ugh, but, maybe the renderings were satire, making fun of modern architecture??
No sea of surface parking lots? Can’t be a real RI proposal!
LikeLike
The architect is a card carrying member of the design mafia:
Professor at Harvard DSG? Check
Pretentious name? Check
Incomprehensible babble about design? Check
Did DeCon when DeCon was in? Check
http://www.prestonscottcohen.com/
LikeLike
P. Scott, as his students call him, is proof that those who can’t do, teach. I find it hard to believe this monstrosity is his. His is usually a different brand of monstrosity.
LikeLike
Maybe they will put the parking on the site of GTECH, which seems to have vanished from one of the images.
LikeLike
The architect of those abortions is a RISD grad. What did Providence do to make him hate it so?
LikeLike
This is so horrifying, that even as a fantasy project, it defies belief that any architect could have conceived it. But someone did. I weep for my profession. This is such a blatantly awful idea that it makes Edward Durell Stone’s 1960’s Masterplan (of which the DoH’s Cannon Building was the only built portion) look subtle and refined. “Hey, let’s take one of the masterpieces of American architecture and bury it amidst a jumble of soulless Neo-Modern boxes.” Some adjectives that might apply: tone deaf, arrogant, megalomaniacal, artless, inept, uninformed, clueless, and anti-urban.
LikeLike
I will add those imprecations to my list, Eric! And by the way, I think I actually like that Cannon Building. I’m sure that’s not the one that TAC (associated with Gropius) built, is it?
LikeLike
The Cannon was by Edward Durrell Stone. In whose office I had my first Architecture job. Though he was long dead by the time I worked there.
LikeLike
It’s so illiterate. I just don’t get how the heritage of Providence can be SO overlooked. This is megamaniacal balderdash!..
LikeLike
I hope you are right, Anon. I recently proposed an outside-the-box HQ2 pitch for Providence (see “How R.I. can get Amazon”), but CommerceRI was evidently not paying attention!
LikeLike
They have about as much chance of winning the Amazon lottery as winning Mega Millions top prize.
LikeLike