Presto! Windows and doors!

Posted on December 23, 2021 by David Brussat

Left, original drawing for 67 Williams St.; right, new drawing with windows and doors. (Shed)

On Monday, Dec. 20, the Providence Historic District Commission met for a second time on the proposal for a new house at 67 Williams St. They were to consider conceptual approval that was delayed on Nov. 22, after the developer, who plans to live there, submitted illustrations oddly free of windows or doors. I assume Monday’s meeting took place, but did not attend and have heard nothing of what happened, if anything did. But new plans submitted by Shed Studio of Cambridge to the HDC before the meeting now include windows and doors.

The appearance, finally, of windows and doors enables potential opponents like me to rest assured that the house will be traditional enough to fit into the historic College Hill neighborhood, which has retained much the same appearance it has had since it got built up slowly in the first century after the revolution. In the first block of Williams east of Benefit Street, most and possibly all of the existing houses are the original ones built on that block.

Aside from that, the front yard seems to have shrunk by several feet, pulling the entire house closer to Williams Street, in reply to the commission’s suggestion at the first meeting that the new house to sit as close to the sidewalk as most of the houses nearby, rather than being set back almost as far as the Carrington House, directly across Williams, one of the minority of mansions on the street. This shift may be seen in the ground plans for the first and second versions at the end of this post. Also changed is the porte-cochere, whose roof is now shingled rather than an extension of the front porch’s roof terrace.

Little else on the exterior seems to be different, so unless the developer came to the second meeting with a third and smaller version of the house, I suspect that the neighbors will probably maintain their primary objection to the house: that it is too big for the neighborhood.

Their objection is understandable – no change in the neighborhood, that is, no new house at all, would be preferable. There has never ever been a house on that lot over the centuries of its existence. Leaving it empty preserves its historical character better then building anything on it, however sensitive it might be to the stylistic template and material quality of the neighborhood.

But the neighbors are objecting to the size of the house, not to the plan to put a new house there for the first time. No doubt they’d prefer that the proposed house and its owners – Jeff Hirsch, a developer from Framingham, and his wife, Karen – just go away. But, perhaps recognizing that it might be unfair to deprive the owners of the lot of their right to use it, they are calling merely for a smaller house. Still, there seems little reason for such a demand. Right across Williams, the Edward Carrington House (1810) is larger than the proposed new house, and the Carrington-Coats House (1816) just east of it is larger still.

The small cottage just to its west was successfully preserved by neighborhood opponents last summer, and, even more important, its proposed modernist addition was defeated at the same time. The cottage garage addition was then redesigned to fit in. It has not yet been built, and one trusts that the commission will make sure that promises of quality design and materials are monitored. The opponents of the perverted attack on the neighborhood’s historical character are to be congratulated. Their persistence drove the developer to drop plans for two modernist townhouses in the woods behind the cottage, facing John Street. Since then, however, the land has been purchased and the trees have been cut down.

Shameful.

Maybe the neighbors are objecting to the size of 67 Williams mainly to keep in practice for the next round of hostilities. If so, I wish them well. Their focus after they lose the battle over size should be to make sure that the design and materials are of the highest quality appropriate for construction in a neighborhood of such extraordinarily historic importance and beauty. A new building can add to the historical character of an old street, but the devil is, as they say, in the details.

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Update: The Dec. 20 meeting was indeed held, and after discussing details including whether the house should be nearer to the sidewalk, the commission voted to delay action until the next meeting.

The original post mistakenly attributed moving the house toward the sidewalk to a suggestion by opponents. It was the commission that suggested this.

Ground plans for first and second versions (l. & r.) of 67 Williams St. show shift in placement. (Shed)

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Garden of House of Mirth

Posted on December 17, 2021 by David Brussat

Edith Wharton in her French garden at St. Claire du Chateau. (newyorkerstateofmind.com)

My last quotation from Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel The House of Mirth offered one minor character’s thoughts on several fancy row houses of Fifth Avenue, including one or two owned by families friendly to Mr. Van Alstyne and his partner in conversation, Lawrence Seldon. After a period of not seeing her, the latter would soon meet the book’s heroine, Lily Bart, a 29-year-old beauty on the verge of old maidenhood (as such matters were calculated in those days), in the garden of a party held at one of the houses under discussion.

Both in its subject and in the elegant prose by which Wharton conveys the scene to the reader, their romantic chat was far more charming than the psychiatry of architecture described in my quotation from the “Wharton’s house of mirth” post on Dec. 2. And in a weak moment I promised readers to reprint the lovelier discussion that was to take place later in the book between Lawrence and Lily. It exemplifies Wharton’s more elegant style of discourse. So, here goes. They approach, shake hands and:

At length Lily withdrew her hand, and moved away a step, so that her white-robed slimness was outlined against the dusk of the branches. Selden followed her, and still without speaking they seated themselves on a bench beside the fountain.

Suddenly she raised her eyes with the beseeching earnestness of a child. “You never speak to me – you think hard things of me,” she murmured. I think of you at any rate, God knows!” he said.

“Then why do we never see each other? Why can’t we be friends? You promised once to help me,” she continued in the same tone, as though the words were drawn from her unwillingly.

“The only way I can help you is by loving you” Selden said in a low voice.

She made no reply, but her face turned to him with the soft motion of a flower. His own met it slowly, and their lips touched.

She drew back and rose from her seat. Selden rose too, and they stood facing each other. Suddenly she caught his hand and pressed it for a moment against her cheek.

“Ah, love me, love me – but don’t tell me so!” she sighed with her eyes in his; and before he could speak she had turned and slipped through the arch of boughs, disappearing in the brightness of the room beyond. Selden stood where she had left him. He knew too well the transiency of exquisite moments to attempt to follow her.

Taken out of context the passage might seem a little bit purplish, something maybe from a cheap romance novel, but the grace of Wharton’s prose is in the authority and concision with which she describes the most delicate and nuanced feelings flitting through her character’s minds. The plot of this novel puts Lily into social circumstances that even we reading today would consider coarse: a scene, for example, in which a wealthy suitor who has lent her money seeks repayment in a baser coin. But the prose never stoops to the level of the action, and from this literary standoffishness arises the lofty sense of architecture – classical architecture, let me be clear – in Wharton’s writing.

I wanted the book to culminate in bliss for Lily and Selden. Spoiler alert: it did not. I was sorely disappointed. I was also surprised. I wonder whether that hints at why so many great novelists tend to avoid happy endings. Well, happy or sad, one can still enjoy the architecture of the English language as one advances through the twists of Wharton’s plot.

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Albany-on-Hudson again?

Posted on December 13, 2021 by David Brussat

“After” view of proposed replacement of I-787 in Albany with boulevard; see “below” at bottom. (ARC)

The capital of the Empire State hopes to do what many cities have done: rip up urban highways inflicted upon them in the 1960s and ’70s. Albany expects soon to remove its elevated eyesore, Interstate 787, which squats between the city and the Hudson River. The aim, according to the Albany Riverfront Collaborative, is to replace the eleven-lane highway, built in the early ’70s, with a ground-level boulevard lined with 93 acres of parks, housing and commercial development.

Begun early this year as a volunteer effort, the cooperative’s mission statement is as follows:

The Albany Riverfront Collaborative will engage our complete community in the creation of an equitable, sustainable, beautiful, forever-vision, and the initial, iterative steps toward this vision. The ARC will forge the robust civic partnerships necessary to nurture a river-connected and sustaining community with a vibrant and interdependent economy, culture, and landscape.

Set of ARC detailed plans, including before/after slides and videos.

Albany’s plan, if undertaken, would open the door to the sort of revitalization its tired downtown needs, much as a similarly conceived plan sparked a return of life, civility and beauty to downtown Providence two decades ago.

Between 1990 and 1996, Providence uncovered its downtown rivers, which were then covered by roads and parking lots known in the Guinness Book of World Records, ed. 1988, as the “widest bridge in the world.” It spanned the daylighted rivers with a dozen lovely new bridges, and lined the embankments with river walks and public parks. The city then doubled down on its “renaissance” by restoring the beauty of its downtown, eliminating its sterile faux-modernist facades, restoring its historic architecture, and installing period lampposts, brick sidewalks and new apartments atop new shops along Westminster Street, its historic main street. As almost an afterthought, Providence removed I-195 from between downtown and its Jewelry district, and rebuilt it 500 yards downriver.

The key to success in Providence was the explicitly traditional style of the plan’s architecture and infrastructure. Rhode Island’s capital city replaced an urban gulch of quasi-modernist style – that is, no style at all – with a set of dependably classicist features that felt friendly to a population used to the traditional tenor of the historical architecture on both the west (downtown) and east (College Hill; Brown, RISD) sides of the intimate Providence and Woonasquatucket rivers.

Albany would be wise to replace Route 787 with a similarly traditional set of embellishments to the boulevard, parks and buildings it erects on the Hudson. If citizens of Albany feel alienated by the gash separating them from the Hudson, the villain is not so much the highway itself but the manner in which urban planners of the era chose – yes, it was a choice – to design its insertion between downtown and the river. In fact, a boulevard was one choice that was rejected early on by the planners of Route 787.

AlbanyGroup Archive of the Hudson riverfront of the past.

Providence’s River Relocation Project, as the new waterfront plan was known, did not spring forth without controversy and compromise. The idea was to open space for traffic from the new Capital Center development to squeeze between the financial district and the Providence and Woonaskquatucket rivers. Their confluence was moved 150 feet to the east. All project elements that were not vehicular, such as the parks and river walks, got a 100-percent match from the U.S. Department of Transportation. However, planners had to add the River Relocation Project to the Capital Center Project, which had already begun in a more typical, sterile design style, by reshuffling private land parcels and grafting a federal transportation project onto a commercial development project – with both elements publicized jointly as a string of public parks. It was not easy.

Leveraging funds for Albany’s project will not be as difficult as it was for Rhode Island in the 1980s and ’90s. Recent federal legislation will open a gusher of money for Albany. Still, planners are always on the edge of taking the wrong step in making big choices for a city’s future – as I-787 demonstrates. The purpose of the Albany Riverfront Collaborative is not just to offer alluring plans for what could replace the elevated highway – detailed plans that were released weeks ago – but to assemble a coalition of interested citizens and groups to make sure that the city’s waterfront receives the share it deserves of the upcoming federal windfall.

As pointed out last month by Albany Times-Union columnist Chris Churchill (“A beginning to 787’s end“), other cities, including Syracuse and Rochester in New York and St. Louis and San Francisco elsewhere in this country have done much the same thing. He writes:

While those efforts are widely regarded as successes, I’m not sure any city could benefit from a highway remake more than Albany. That’s because 787 is uncommonly monstrous in how it completely dominates the riverfront, with its 11 lanes of traffic (including arterials) and all those ridiculous ramps sucking up land and obliterating a resource.

“Interstate 787 is dramatically overbuilt for demand,” adds Churchill, “which is why [the Albany Riverfront Collaborative] believes a boulevard would have only a minimal impact on commute times.”

The proposed boulevard would be much slenderer than the maximalist footprint of the highway system now in place. The boulevard would replace the highway and dozens of dank parking lots beneath it that add to the difficulty pedestrians must face to reach the waterfront. The ARC has estimated that 73,000 tons of concrete would be replaced by 6,500 trees.

Green trees taking the place of gray concrete all sounds very nice, but I cannot sufficiently emphasize the importance of design choices that will face Albany if and when the decision to replace the highway is made. When I was writing about Providence’s waterfront project in the late 1980s and ’90s, I examined the design of waterfronts that had been built in the United States and around the world. A helpful resource was The Waterfront Center, in Washington, D.C., nonprofit and its two volumes (there have been more editions since) that described and photographed scores of new waterfront projects around the world. Almost all of them were characterized by sterile, streamlined, modernist design styles, often replacing industrial environments such as wharfs and railroad yards with styles designed, in a perverse paradox, to reflect the current industrial chic. Those styles were prominent then and are still today. The popularity of Providence’s new waterfront arises in part from its refusal to truckle to such design concepts

Its success includes the now-famous WaterFire art installation, which since 1994 has attracted over 40,000 visitors a dozen times yearly for the last 26 years (the 2020 season was cancelled for the usual reason).

Rhode Island was one of America’s original thirteen colonies, and its new waterfront is traditional in style, which means that most citizens here feel a kinship with a civic project designed to fit in with the city’s historic character.

I dare say most waterfront projects being built today embrace the very same design cues avoided by Providence and highlighted by The Waterfront Center. Planners in Albany will find themselves under great pressure to follow the city’s planning establishment if the project moves forward. Thus it is vital to ensure that the city’s citizens play a role in choosing its design template. The Albany Riverfront Collaborative seems to have made an excellent start in this and other aspects of its commendable effort to end the civic tragedy of Interstate 787.

“Below” view of Albany with current I-787 highway configuration blocking access to Hudson. (ARC)

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The hegemony of architecture

Posted on December 7, 2021 by David Brussat
Architecture may be suffering from a hegemonic conundrum that afflicts the major institutions of the whole world. It is not just hegemon vs. hegemon anymore, according to analyst Richard Fernandez in his recent essay “There Is Something Wrong with our Giant Institutions.” Instead, what we may now have is the slow-motion collapse of major societal institutions – whether in the realm of world affairs (such as the U.S. vs. China) or in the operation of one’s local Department of Motor Vehicles.
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(We all know how the U.S. is collapsing. I would be interested in hearing how China is collapsing. But the CCP is unlikely to satisfy my curiosity.)
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So what has that to do with architecture? First, please forgive me for using a ridiculously highfalutin word, hegemon, which means an entity of powerful influence in a particular field. Fernandez speculates that the big institutions that run our society have become too complex to manage effectively, leading to the “awareness that bureaucracies have expanded to their level of incompetence.” Fernandez concludes:
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The world, like a team of wild horses, may have gotten away from the U.N., Xi, Vladimir, and Joe because it’s gotten too dang complicated to control. Going back to historical metaphors, humanity may be reliving, not the fall of Rome but the fall of Babel.
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Architecture’s hegemon since World War II has been modernism. In the 1950s it replaced tradition’s dominance in building design that had lasted for centuries. Architecture used to be about designing buildings, but in recent decades the field has submerged itself in a broader realm of finance and industry, in which profits depend not on satisfying the needs of individual clients – whether of families or corporate boards – but on advancing interconnected corporate and institutional strategies and agendas having little to do with specific buildings or even, lately, the established purposes of those corporations or institutions.
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The diversity of such agendas has undermined the single-mindedness of most advanced design firms. The firms themselves have grown exponentially as each item of their expanding agendas has required the hiring of employees to staff a cascading range of new offices and departments, some of which have little or nothing to do with architecture. Urban planning firms have always been more complex than architecture firms, but their expanding agendas also push them further toward unmanagability.
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A good example, perhaps, is the new urbanism, which started out as a movement that in the 1990s gained popularity by designing new communities that appealed to families seeking traditional homes in walkable neighborhoods of a sort where “grandma used to live.” In recent decades, the new urbanists seem to have sunk their original thinking into a broader agenda where style and tradition are now secondary to such meta concerns as climate change and social equity. The new agenda has introduced complexity into the original movement’s simple program – “the old urbanism revived” – that so many Americans found so compelling.
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This increased complexity has been embraced by modernist architectural firms but resisted by more traditional firms interested in offering the normal services provided by firms that build traditional houses and buildings. The existence of such firms was almost eradicated by 1960. Today, however, they are experiencing a reasonably robust revival. Such firms operate on a simpler, more direct agenda, that of designing houses and buildings for clients. They are an anchor of stability in a fast-changing field embedded in a fast-changing world. Ditto families who seek an oasis amid the churning sands of this complicated environment.
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Simplicity is not simplemindedness. Traditional architecture springs from classical forms that are nothing if not complex, and require years of study for architects to master. Buildings without ornament turn out, however, to be more stunningly complex than buildings of refined embellishment. It is difficult for modernist architects to invent new forms without aesthetic precedent, involving novel materials and recourse to computerized manipulation of elements. On top of that consider the added difficulty of navigating the intersection of practicality with the broader agenda demanded of most architects. The head spins.
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The public often feels alienated from their built environment, and increasingly from the design process at their local level. They feel helpless to press for beauty. Transparency is elusive. Nowadays, drawings of proposed development projects aim more to disguise than to reveal their intended appearance, if not from clients then from possible opponents in the community.
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Each new attempt at novelty strains the relationship between a building and its intended use. Complexity of purpose challenges purity of form, defeating any pretext of straightforwardness in design. New modernist buildings of high aesthetic intent all bear this out.
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Traditional architecture, on the other hand, consists largely of taking the same tried and true steps codified over centuries and applied, again and again, in the process of designing and constructing buildings that meet their avowed purpose. In the hands of generations of craftsmen on site, change operates more slowly in the development of traditional styles, materials, technologies and construction techniques than change in modernist practices, which are always in flux.
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The late Roger Scruton wrote that “[t]he classical idiom does not so much impose unity as make diversity agreeable.” Bringing order and dignity to the stage of human endeavor – including public participation in solving problems from the local level to the global – could and should again become the purpose of architecture. It has been lost but it can be regained.
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It is hard to know which direction these thoughts could lead if teased out beyond my level of competence. Still, it seems clear that in the battle of styles, in the war between a healthy simplicity and a dire complexity, traditional architecture may boast a decided advantage in challenging a modernist hegemon increasingly tangled in its own Peter Principle.
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Wharton’s “House of Mirth”

Posted on December 2, 2021 by David Brussat

14 W. 23rd St., where Edith Wharton was born.* Bottom, two of 5th Ave. from 1905. (Untapped Cities)

Being about two-thirds through Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel, I am still not quite sure I’ve actually encountered the “house of mirth” she gives as its title. What follows is a passage in which a secondary character, Van Alstyne, in Wharton’s set of Upper East Side socialites, describes to another character, Lawrence Selden, his understanding of the feelings expressed through architectural styles chosen by the families that have built new houses on a stretch of Fifth Avenue across from Central Park.

Van Alstyne prided himself on his summing up of social aspects, and with Selden for audience was eager to show the sureness of his touch. … [A]s the two men walked down Fifth Avenue the new architectural developments of that versatile thoroughfare invited Van Alstyne’s comment.

“That Greiner house, now – a typical rung in the social ladder! The man who built it came from a milieu where all the dishes are put on the table at once. His façade is a complete architectural meal; if he had omitted a style his friends might have thought the money had given out. Not a bad purchase for Rosedale, though: attracts attention, and awes the Western sightseer. By and bye he’ll get out of that phase, and want something that the crowd will pass and the few pause before. Especially if he marries my clever cousin—”

Selden dashed in with the query: “And the Wellington Brys’ [house]? Rather clever of its kind, don’t you think?”

They were just beneath the wide white façade, with its rich restraint of line, which suggested the clever corseting of a redundant figure.

“That’s the next stage: the desire to imply that one has been to Europe, and has a standard. I’m sure Mrs. Bry thinks her house a copy of the Trianon [at Versailles outside Paris]: in America every marble house with gilt furniture is thought to be a copy of the Trianon. What a clever chap that architect is, though – how he takes his client’s measure! He has put the whole of Mrs. Bry in his use of the composite order. Now for the Trenors, you remember, he chose the Corinthian: exuberant, but based on the best precedent. The Trenor house is one of his best things – doesn’t look like a banqueting hall turned inside out. I hear Mrs. Trenor wants to build out a new ball-room, and that divergence from [husband] Gus on that point keeps her at Bellomont [their Hudson River estate]. The dimensions of the Brys’ ball-room must rankle: you may be sure she knows ’em as well as if she’d been there last night with a yard-measure.”

For sheer beauty of language and subtlety of thought I’d rather have quoted from the scene in the garden outside the Brys’ ballroom between Selden and Lily Bart, the novel’s protagonist. Readers of this book will know the scene to which I refer. But I will only say that even though the above passage doesn’t necessarily reflect the noblest thoughts that might spring from façades along Fifth Avenue, Edith Wharton’s deft control of the English language certainly resembles the control applied by the best architects to the façades of their clients’ mansions.

Maybe in the near future I will post the quotation that I have resisted posting this evening, on pages 137-38 (Penguin 1993). It is certainly superior to the speech Van Alstyne, an unartistic man, uses to describe the mansions of his friends. The passage quoted above merely describes how a typical man of the Gilded Age might think of what architects hired by the wealthy design their houses for (pages 159-60). The passage from the Wellington Brys’ garden describing the romantic scene between Lily and Selden (including a gentle kiss and a squeezed hand) comes much closer to the summit of the novelist’s art, and probably suggests, in parallel, a higher level of the architect’s art than the houses along Fifth Avenue, lovely as they were then and, to a degree, still are. (See my recent post consisting of a video of Fifth Avenue in the early 1930s.)

(*Regarding the photo atop this post, I can only assume that among these buildings is 14 W. 23rd. There is no caption, and no way in the text of the article on the Untapped Cities web site to tell which, if any, of them is either where Wharton was born or where she lived with her husband after marriage. The building at the right is 16 so possibly 14 is in the middle with a Starbucks.)

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Notre-Dame falls to Disney?

Posted on November 27, 2021 by David Brussat

Interior of Notre-Dame cathedral before fire in April 2019. (insider.com)

Officials overseeing reconstruction of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame announced, on Sept. 18, that the landmark would open in time for the Paris Olympics in 2024. Good! However, the UK Telegraph has just run an article based on leaked plans to modernize the cathedral’s interior, creating what the newspaper calls a “politically correct Disneyland.”

Might that spark a controversy likely to delay any 2024 reopening? For two years, international attention has been focused on whether the exterior would be an authentic rebuild rather than a modernist mashup of the building. Now it seems that plans to mash up the interior are sneaking around behind the world’s back.

The Telegraph suggests that interior items that survived the fire of April 15, 2019, such as confessional boxes, altars, and classical sculptures, would be replaced with “modern art murals,” plus sound and light effects to create “emotional spaces,” and other features uncongenial to a faithful restoration.

Fild Media reports that a “catechumenal path” – catechism lite – would be used to evangelize visitors, especially those from outside the Christian and Catholic faiths. The path would eventually end at a chapel dedicated to ‘reconciled creation,’ a concept emphasized in Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ encyclical.

Paris-based architect Maurice Culot criticized the plan:

What they are proposing to do to Notre Dame would never be done to Westminster Abbey or St. Peter’s in Rome. It’s a kind of theme park and very childish and trivial given the grandeur of the place.

Le Figaro, which got “synthesis photographs” illustrating the plan, suggests that new, more colorful stained-glass windows and other lighting effects in various naves “gives an impression of an airport runway, or even of a parking lot.”

Cathedral officials, according to a report in the National Catholic Register (based in Ohio), immediately regretted some of the “exaggerations” in the press. A spokeswoman for the Paris diocese, Karine Dalle, asserted that the details would not be finalized until next March, and tried to put the leaked plan into context:

Some people got wind of some of the options and pounced on it, reducing the project to a battle between tradition and contemporary art but it is much more than that, and it goes without saying that the archbishop has never had any intention to turn the cathedral into an airport or a parking lot!

Sure, maybe it is “much more than that,” but it is also a battle between tradition and contemporary art – one that most observers of (and, you’d think, donors to) the cathedral’s reconstruction thought had already been settled.

The assumption is that many visitors from other cultures do not understand the cathedral and its works of painting and sculpture that miraculously survived the conflagration. Many visitors from Catholic and other western cultures probably understand it just as little. Nor is it clear that the renovation now being planned will help them understand, wherever they are from. It may be that visitors from other cultures want no less than most visitors to experience a faithful rebuilding of the great cathedral, inside and out.

Why ruin the experience for devoted and knowledgeable Catholics and the many, many others who merely seek to indulge a taste for beauty or history, in order to offer a dubious assistance to the uninitiated? Why not instead provide the latter with the sort of headphone guides that museums offer to patrons? Such digital docents, which barely require even literacy, would be far less expensive than the $60 million or so these cockeyed renovations are expected to cost.

I have little doubt that toute la France will rise up and smite this desecration of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, of which Victor Hugo in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame spoke truly: “When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.”

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Why no windows or doors?

Posted on November 24, 2021 by David Brussat

Drawing for conceptual approval of house at 67 Williams St. “Look, Ma! No windows!” (Shed)

Not long after neighborhood opposition prevailed over insensitive development proposals for historic Fox Point and College Hill in Providence, a new developer and a different architect have arisen to propose a new house on the vacant land just east of the adorable Italianate cottage at issue last summer.

The proposed new house is large but not, it seems to me, large enough to cause dismay among the neighbors. The house just east of it is considerably larger, and the cottage to its west is much smaller, even with the addition. Neighborhood opposition blocked a modernist addition this past summer, delaying the process for months and months; the developer threw up his hands and compelled his architect, the celebrated Friedrich St. Florian, to design an addition much more traditional than the architect desired. Up until then, his designs kept getting more and more modernist, though he must have known of the neighborhood’s desire for a house that fit in, or “harmonized,” with its historical character.

That is the natural feeling of neighbors who have invested considerable amounts to live amid that air of history, and, in so doing, themselves become agents of change, change that either contributes to history or rejects it. And most prefer the former category. They would no more want to change their house in a way that seems to reject history than they would want to live next to a house that degrades the beauty of the block they live on. For example, they would never put solar panels on their roof. How gauche!

Well, the house proposed for the lot at 67 Williams St. is pictured atop this post. It has the lines of a traditional house, but it has no doors or windows. You don’t believe me? Look at the illustration, from Shed Studio, in Cambridge. There are no doors or windows! How can that be? Initial renderings submitted by an applicant to the Providence Historic District Commission do not normally lack such items. Even St. Florian’s designs had doors and windows at the earliest stages of the design review process. Doors and windows are vital elements of a design, even if it is submitted for merely “conceptual” approval.

How the windows or doors are designed could reveal whether the style of the house is to be traditional or modernist.

One commissioner noted, out loud, that the applicants (Jeff and Karen Hirsch, of Framingham, Mass.), even as they failed to put doors and windows on the renderings, had managed to sketch in elements such as balcony railings, roof cornices, and columns for the front porch and porte cochere. Why?

My general theory of architectural rendering is that drawings nowadays are meant less to convey information about a design than to disguise it. Modernist architects are quite aware that neighbors in historic districts are likely to dislike whatever they propose, so why not put off opposition as long as possible?

Still, it was no surprise that the HDC, which met Monday, voted unanimously to “continue” the application – that is, put off any decision until the applicant drew in the windows and doors and brought them to the commission’s next meeting. Surely the commission grokked the applicants’ strategy before it was deployed. A question worth asking might be why the application was considered acceptable for deliberation without any hint of proposed windows and doors.

I am heartened, however, by the application itself. It reads in part:

The design seeks to be contextual with the neighborhood in terms of size, scale, massing and basic design language.

That’s pretty straightforward, you would think. But words such as context, harmony and the like are subject to manipulation in a legal process, which is frankly what design review in a historic district is.

Still, maybe my cynicism is unwarranted. Do the applicants, when they finally move into their house, want to be hated by the neighbors, or welcomed as new homeowners who understand and accept that experimentation with the look of their venerable environment is no way to make friends. We may expect to find out at the next HDC meeting, scheduled for Monday, Dec. 20., at 4:45 p.m.

All of the houses near the proposed house were drawn without windows or doors. (Shed)

Drawing of the neighborhood along Williams Street shows different house sizes. (Shed)

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“Dystopia” three years on

Posted on November 21, 2021 by David Brussat

James Stevens Curl, author of “Making Dystopia,” “The Oxford Dictionary of Architecture,” and other scholarly treatments of architecture. (National Civic Art Society)

Three years have passed since British architectural historian James Stevens Curl’s masterful Making Dystopia was published by Oxford University Press. Subtitled “The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism,” the book can only have been about modern architecture, perhaps the most curious and indeed outrageous phenomenon of our time.

Writing in The Critic a few months ago, the mathematician and architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros described the book this way:

Curl’s critique of the theory and practice of modernism demolished the economical-ethical-political arguments put forward for decades that justified forcing people to live in inhuman environments. It was all a power-play, to drive humane architecture and its practitioners into the ground so that a new group of not very competent architects and academics could take over.

Stevens Curl in his book describes the result this way:

A great language capable of infinite variety of expression, a mighty and expansive vocabulary, a vast resource based on two and a half millennia or more of civilization, was superseded by a series of monosyllabic grunts, foisted on the populace with a totalitarian disregard for the opinions of those who had not been drilled to conform.

No wonder Stevens Curl won the 2019 Arthur Ross award for history and writing, bestowed by the New York chapter (and national headquarters) of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art.

Has Making Dystopia diminished the unwarrantedly high status of modernist architecture over those years? Undoubtedly it has. Salingaros asked himself the same question in “Still Making Dystopia” and sadly concluded that evidence for the book’s impact on modernism must be considered elusive.

I once predicted in my review of the book on Amazon that if Dystopia got the attention it deserved,

it will start a revolution in the way we shape our built environment, and the result will be as vital as the discovery by mankind that the natural environment is in equal peril. It will rank with civilization’s victories in defeating totalitarianism and bringing democracy to Germany and Japan after WWII, and to Eastern Europe after the defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Some will dismiss that, but the eradication of beauty from the intensely visual field of architecture – the queen of the arts – which we all must experience every day and have done so since childhood, has had a major saddening effect on the world, and its reversal will bring about an efflorescence of happiness. It’s possible that James Stevens Curl’s book will launch that revolution.

It is still possible, but it has not happened yet. As Salingaros points out, the architectural establishment has savaged the book, and it has not been read or commented on by elite practitioners in the field, who have ignored it.

This is not unexpected. In our day and age, miseducated elites regularly ram poorly conceived policies down the throats of their supposed beneficiaries. Not only in architecture is this true, and in architectural education, but it’s true in education at all levels, K-Ph.D. It’s true in law enforcement from local police up to federal agencies – the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon – charged with protecting the public and the nation. It’s true in science, health, in so many fields: wherever false narratives prevail, with the legacy media running interference for one side only in debates over facts and truth, local, state, national and international. But as Stevens Curl’s book strongly suggests, this state of affairs has prevailed in architecture since the 1920s, longer than in any other field.

Still, the book has been a godsend to those who practice architecture and city building as it was practiced for hundreds, even thousands of years. But even if such a positive emotional impact has been widely felt, evidence of it would be hard to find. Even if there were a measurable uptick in architectural practitioners citing Stevens Curl’s book, or design critics giving more credence to tradition or denouncing modernism more harshly after reading it, or municipalities leveling unequal playing fields that face traditional practitioners seeking commissions in cities and towns, it would still be impossible to count all the citations, even on the internet, or to develop a detailed ennumeration of the lies, disinformation, coverups, and sheer bad faith and brutality of the current establishment.

“What is missing from much debate about architecture today,” writes Stevens Curl toward the end of Dystopia (page 333),

is empathy, respect for culture in the widest sense, understanding of history (including religion), recognition of the imperative of nature as part of humankind’s habitat, and understanding of the importance of expressions of gravity and stability in building design to induce calm and ease in those who have to live with the realized works of an architecture that denies gravity, that deliberately sets out to disturb, and that only respects itself.

Hard facts characterize this scholarly volume of 388 pages, not including 75 pages of notes, 43 of bibliography, 40 of index, and many photographs and drawings, including some by the author. Along with numerous books on mostly architectural subjects, Stevens Curl also wrote (with Susan Wilson) the Oxford Dictionary of Architecture, with many wry comments in modernist entries.

And yet insurrection against evil can begin at the bottom and, when successful, bring change to the top. Immeasurables such as the influence of a powerful book, one that indicts a corrupt regime, can spark revolution. It has happened many times before, in every realm of society, across time and across the globe. It is happening today in the food industry, to name just one with which many are familiar. It may be just starting to happen in the field of education, and it sure can happen in architecture. But architecture is more tightly nailed down by its establishment than any other field, and will require sparks to be set by people at the bottom, as it were: in local neighborhoods where architects and developers are most vulnerable to direct action.

I will give one example, a woman in Providence who has probably not read Making Dystopia but has led opposition to modernist house proposals being forced into a historic neighborhood. Lily Bogossian led locals on a charge into the belly of the beast, battled smart and tough, emerged victorious, and is about to do it again, taking on a new set of developers and purveyors of ugliness aiming to crush the spirit of a beautiful city and a free society. Good for her. I urge her, if she has not, to read Making Dystopia. If beauty is to regain the upper hand here and around the world, her like must become legion.

When dissatisfaction strongly felt by the public wells up into revolt, the elites do not realize it until too late. Either this will happen someday, or it will not. But if it happens, it probably would not have happened without the powerful impetus of James Stevens Curl’s Making Dystopia.

Posted in Architecture, Books and Culture | Tagged , , , , | 9 Comments

Presto chango bus hub idea!

Posted on November 16, 2021 by David Brussat

Latest plan for a new RIPTA bus hub to replace centralized facility at Kennedy Plaza. (Union Studio)

Seemingly out of the clear blue sky a completely new bus hub idea has suddenly emerged in Providence. The Innovation District Transit Center, it’s called. The reigning notion of shifting most buses from Kennedy Plaza to a pair of new sub hubs blocks away has not been popular. Most riders believe the bus hub should remain in the plaza. So instead of sticking with the decades-old tried and true, downtown advocates such as the Providence Foundation and Grow Smart RI now propose a whole new ballgame, popping in from far left field.

So far, neither city nor state has turned thumbs up or down on the proposal.

According to a Providence Journal article by Patrick Anderson and published last Thursday, the new proposed bus hub would sit near the Garrahy Court House, on a large parcel of parking lots at the intersection of Dorrance and Dyer streets, one block from the Providence River. It would be a multi-use facility expected to include shops, restaurants and 40 units of housing in a six-story brick building. Will it be affordable housing? “Workforce housing” says the plan.

Anderson writes:

A coalition of nonprofits and businesses are promoting a plan to move the bus berths in Kennedy Plaza inside a proposed six-story building containing a new full-service transit terminal. In addition to shops, restaurants, an indoor waiting area, public bathrooms and parking, the new $77-million terminal building would also have more than 40 apartments.

The proponents, who include Grow Smart RI and the Providence Foundation, came up with the plan after the state’s proposal to replace the Kennedy Plaza hub with three new facilities sparked outrage from city officials and advocates for transit riders.

I don’t recall reading of any such “outrage” from city officials, who seemed perfectly willing to buy into spending a $35 million state bond issue on items that the public did not vote for in 2014. Transit activists have all along deplored the heightened distances and rider confusion considered likely under the plan to split up Kennedy Plaza’s central role, with two new sub hubs at the train station and, as originally conceived, at the proposed Garrahy garage. The plaza’s future grows only cloudier under the latest plan. The plan’s visioneers want to “alleviate crowding” in Kennedy Plaza. Huh? What planet are they living on?

The six-story building’s design is traditional, and quite nice, not surprisingly so from the downtown firm of Union Studio Architecture. Union Studio’s plan of 2013 for Kennedy Plaza, which integrated an upgraded public square into the existing bus amenities, was frog-marched out of the picture in favor of a sterile redesign, implemented in 2015, that included removing the plaza’s Art Nouveau waiting kiosks and substituting highly unenchanting plastic kiosks.

Now Union Studio has been tapped to design the new terminal on Dorrance. Does this mean that its 2013 plan for Kennedy Plaza is now alive again? Or is it more of a quid pro quo for having been stiffed by the 2014 plaza redesign, which introduced maximum sterility into what was once a lovely civic square? A tug of war between traditional and modernist visions of downtown’s future seems to be in progress. Advocates of civic beauty have had little to applaud of late.

Kennedy Plaza is named after a dead white male, so it seems to be an obvious candidate for cancellation by today’s laughably woke municipal administration and its corporate backers.

That may seem over the top, but apparently the city is now planning to sell its beautiful statue of Christopher Columbus, recently removed, rather than storing it until the current mania has passed. Think of the most stupid ideas for how to move this city forward, and they are all being thrown at the wall to see if they stick. A cartoonish new entrance to Roger Williams Park is being erected at its Broad Street entrance. Kennedy Plaza and Waterplace have been targeted with kindergarten amenities – referred to absurdly as a “more vibrant and welcoming public space” by proponents. They would, for example, place an automatic rain maker above Waterplace (just what we need!), raise the river walks by eleven feet, and demolish a perfectly good skating rink at Burnside Park in favor of a curlicue rink in the plaza itself. They seem willing to destroy beautiful Providence rather than continue to stew in frustration at its privileged status among American cities of its size.

All of this churning just wastes money that could fund genuine necessities as we emerge from the pandemic. I wonder how much of the $35 million in bond money even remains after so many rounds of idiotic “planning” since 2014? Not enough to fund the $77 million Innovation District Transit Center, I dare say! (Gov. Dan McKee has wrinkled his nose at that cost figure.)

This city has rebounded in the past half century because it has tried (fitfully, to be sure) to retain its civilized legacy, most endearingly and enduringly via its traditional redesign of the waterfront by the late Bill Warner between 1990 and 1996. How the latest ideas for Kennedy Plaza and public transit fit into a scenario that seems eager to repudiate that history is anybody’s guess.

The dark trapezoidal land is where the new facility would go. (Union Studio)

Posted in Architecture, Development, Providence | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Update on Mack restoration

Posted on November 12, 2021 by David Brussat

Glasgow School of Art before the fires of 2014 and 2018. (Photo by Steve Cadman)

With bigwigs and celebs jetting away at last from Scotland’s global climate summit, what else is afoot in the city of Glasgow?

The famous 1909 Glasgow School of Art by Charles Rennie Mackintosh has not been rebuilt after its near destruction after two fires in 2014 and 2018. The cause of the latter conflagration remains elusive. While its restoration may be years off, the good news is that in October, leaders of the school agreed that “faithful reinstatement” would be the preferred strategy for rebuilding.

The other options were to build a new building altogether, or a hybrid consisting of new structure inserted into what can be saved of the original structure.

Faithful reinstatement leans, as I understand it, more toward replication among the various synonyms for restoration. Many modernist architects and academics have pushed since 2018 for the school to lean toward new construction or some sort of hybrid. They assert, dubiously, that since Mackintosh was creative, the most “creative” rebuilding strategy would best honor his innovative nature. So the best strategy would be that which is the farthest from rebuilding the Mack (its local nickname) as originally designed – failing to notice that such a strategy would also precipitate flight among potential donors to the building’s salvation.

The most stringent definition of restoration would favor using as much of the remaining structure as safely possible while fabricating damaged or destroyed structures, features and embellishments with Mackintosh’s original designs as templates, with materials as close as possible to the original. Extensive archival drawings and photographs, assembled over the years, enable artisans to replicate the architect’s quirks with considerable confidence.

Architects Journal adds detail about long-revered spaces within the building that are more or less lost but could be devotedly replicated:

Iconic spaces, such as the library, board room, director’s office, Mackintosh Room, lecture theatre, Studio 58, the Hen Run, loggia, museum and Studio 11 will be reinstated together with all the other spaces, including studios.

But some observers have been pushing against that reasonable strategy. Among the most persistent is architect Alan Dunlop, whose opinion seems to appear with deadening regularity wherever rebuilding GSA is discussed. Last year, after desire for its restoration seemed to gain the upper hand, Dunlap tried to retwist the debate in his own direction:

I think the narrative around the future of the building has changed, with the emphasis now on restoration rather than replication of the original school. In other words, we should save what’s left of the building and put in a modern insertion.

He nudges and declaims, as if his kooky preferences might somehow gain force if repeated often enough. Since even the recent decision to faithfully reinstate the Mack is still subject to continued obsessive official analysis and reassessment, Dunlop might win in the end. But since the October decision, he seems to have resigned himself to the prevailing restoration strategy. No doubt he’ll be lying in wait in case things turn south, as often happens in cases of extreme bureaucratic sclerosis. No one expects the building to reopen before 2028 at the earliest.

My preferred alternative would be to not only rebuild the original as faithfully as possible but, in addition, to demolish the school’s recently built Seona Reid building by Steven Holl directly across Renfrew Street from Mackintosh’s original structure. What a horror! (See below.) But, of course, that will not happen. Which does not mean that it should not happen. Here is a quote from the opening of Observer critic Rowan Moore’s review of it, which places the building – and all others of its ilk – in proper perspective:

“Have you heard of the artist James Turrell?” asks Chris McVoy, partner in Steven Holl Architects of New York, and inside me something dies. When architects mention Turrell, it means that they have seen his installations and think that, because like him they play with white walls and light, they can make something as mesmerising. However valid their work in other ways, they can’t. It is like thinking that any painting of yellow flowers is a Van Gogh.

(As mesmerising as what? one might nevertheless ask.)

Like so many other cities in Europe, including London and now Paris, Glasgow has tried to commit suicide via modern architecture. Luckily, Europe’s stock of historical fabric is so intact that it takes a lot of modern architecture to ruin. Most American cities once had such strength but do not any longer, and have not for a long time. (Providence still does.) In deciding to “faithfully reinstate” its famous school of art, Glasgow seems to recognize (as the leaders of Providence do not) what they must do to avoid the fate of American cities like Houston. (My advice: city planners everywhere should set aside a sandbox for the modernists.)

Reid Building across Renfrew Street from the Mack. (UK Guardian)

The Mack, center left, and the Reid Building in Glasgow. (Photo by Peter Drummond)

West George Street showcases beauty of Glasgow. (visitscotland.com)

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