“Lost Providence” explained

Posted on October 11, 2017 by David Brussat
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Weybosset Street, in downtown Providence. (Lost Providence)

I just submitted my October post for my blog at Traditional Building, entitled “Monument vs. Fabric, or the difficulty of admitting deep error.” This means I am free to post my last month’s TB post on my Architecture Here and There blog. It was called “Lost Providence: How to interpret my new book.” Here is that interpretation as enunciated by its author.

First, a passage from the TB interpretation of the book:

Since the late 1940s and ‘50s, modern architecture has attained such a stranglehold on the field of architecture that the prospects for reform have seemed bleak. It took modernism only a couple of decades to go from niche curiosity to the conventional wisdom. Tradition has been trying to stage a comeback since the late 1950s, when Henry Hope Reed published The Golden City. What gives me hope is the speed with which historic preservation transformed itself from a hobby to a mass movement – an ongoing social revolution triggered far less by a love of history than a desire to preserve local beauty from the threat of modern architecture. Reforming the field could happen in the blink of an eye.

Stranger things have happened – such as how it took modernism only a couple of decades to go from niche curiosity (see H.L. Mencken’s dismissive editorial, “The New Architecture,” in the American Mercury of February 1931) to conventional wisdom. Should I take on that subject as the topic of a new book? Hmm.

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“Lost Prov” at Lippitt House

Posted on October 10, 2017 by David Brussat
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Henry Lippitt House, circa 1880. (Preserve Rhode Island)

The Lost Providence dog and pony show looks forward to luxuriating, on Thursday evening, at the Henry Lippitt House Museum, on the southeast corner of Hope & Angell streets. Hosted by Preserve Rhode Island, the event begins with a reception for the author at 6:30. His illustrated talk begins at 7. The evening is free to members of PRI and $5 for the general public.

This is simply a divine location for a lecture.

Henry Lippitt designed and oversaw the construction of the house in 1865. Beginning in 1875, the textile heir served two one-year terms as Rhode Island’s governor. He and three succeeding generations of the family lived in the mansion until 1979. After its acquisition by Preserve Rhode Island, it has served as a house museum since 1993. PRI has this to say about the physical characteristics of the house:

[T]he house is a three story, thirty room Renaissance Revival villa with Italian palazzo elements. Embellished with elaborate faux finishes, colorful stained glass windows, ornate woodwork details, and surviving original furnishings, the house is also significant for its pioneering heating and plumbing systems.

We love that!

In Part I of Lost Providence, the author uses a sort of “editorial he” language to refer to himself (as in, for example, “your distinguished correspondent”), but starting with Chapter 19 (“We Hate That”) in Part II, he begins to use the first person singular to refer to himself. An explanation why, if anyone wants to know, might be sought during the Q&A session after Thursday’s talk.

Unless a new event pops up unexpectedly, this will be the last occasion this year to sit down and drink in my curious discourse about Providence’s history of architectural change, and what the future might (and should!) bring. Not until Feb. 28, 2018, at the Johnston Historical Society, is another such opportunity scheduled to occur.

In the video below, the author’s family reacts to the discovery of a sign on the railing of the Lippitt House. The illustration on the sign is a drawing of Weybosset Street from the Downtown Providence 1970 Plan, which in 1960 announced the “Eradication of History as a Development Strategy,” as the author of Lost Providence describes it in Chapter 15. (It is easy to slip in and out of the “editorial we.”)

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Henry James’s Fort Chester

Posted on October 9, 2017 by David Brussat
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Part of the city wall at Chester, England. (treasuredays.com)

At the outset of his novel The Ambassadors, Henry James describes a couple meandering through Chester, England, once a Roman town, near today’s industrial city of Liverpool. His description evokes the subtleties of living architecture as well as I have ever seen it expressed. Not long ago I blogged passages from The Princess Casamassima. There is a book that compiles the best of James’s writing about cities – mostly from his novels, I suppose. I will not rest until I find that book, and when I find it I will be able, when the muse is on strike, to fill a quick post with a dear passage. Like this one:

The tortuous wall – girdle, long since snapped, of the little swollen city, half held in place by careful civic hands – wanders in narrow file between parapets smoothed by peaceful generations, pausing here and there for a dismantled gate or a bridged gap, with rises and drops, steps up and steps down, queer twists, queer contacts, peeps into homely streets and under the brows of gables, views of cathedral towers and waterside fields, of huddled English town and ordered English country. Too deep almost for words was the delight of these things to Strether.

In English Hours, which James wrote, according to a note at the rear of The Ambassadors, in 1905, he further adumbrates the joys of “the tortuous wall”:

The civic consciousness, sunning itself thus on the city’s rim and glancing at the little swarming towered and gabled city within, and then at the blue undulations of the near Welsh border, may easily deepen to delicious complacency.

Ahhh!

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Central Chester (ytimg

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Where’s the “beauty” beef?

Posted on October 7, 2017 by David Brussat
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The public was asked to choose from these four actual buildings. (Beatus Est)

A couple of days ago, aware that I’ve been going around telling people that the public prefers traditional to modern architecture by huge margins, my dear mother-in-law, Agnes, asked me a good question: “Where’s the beef?”

There is a lot of evidence, and I am compiling it for her, but here’s one classicist’s reply to a modernist critic’s response to a survey that pointed out (what seems to me to be) the obvious. Commissioned in 2008 by ADAM Architects and the Traditional Architecture Group, in London, the survey showed four buildings – two traditional and two modernist – and found that of 1,042 members of the public asked which they’d rather have near their homes, three-quarters preferred the traditional buildings.

This brought on Jonathan Glancey’s critique of the survey in The Guardian and the reply to it from Erik Bootsma (whom I met on a trip to D.C. a while back) on his blog Beatus Est. His reply is entitled “When a Survey Shows Britons Prefer Classicism, Architects Attack!” (Unfortunately, neither Glancey’s piece nor the study itself are still available online.)

After describing the survey, Bootsma begins his response to Glancey :

Much to the surprise of the architectural establishment (but to neither Adam nor myself) the public preferred the traditional schemes by a three to one ratio. Predictably, though, the architectural press and heads of the prestigious architecture organizations in Great Britain used the survey as a launchpad for their invective against traditional architecture and ultimately on the public at large.

Bootsma goes on to tag Glancey’s unfair rhetorical thrusts and his clear disdain for the public. It’s a fine read. I wish I’d written it myself!

Back with more soon, Mom!

***

By the way, my next lecture – during which I will claim, yet again, that the public prefers traditional to modernist architecture by overwhelming margins – will be next Thursday, Oct. 12, at the Lippitt House, corner of Hope & Angell. Sponsored by Preserve Rhode Island, the event begins with a reception for the author at 6:30 p.m. and an illustrated lecture at 7 p.m. It is free for PRI members and $5 for the public. This will be my last scheduled public appearance until the Johnston Historical Society hosts me on Feb. 28, 2018.

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Antelope Freeway, 1/8 miles

Posted on October 6, 2017 by David Brussat
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Cartoon by Mark Anderson. (andertoons.com)

The Journal reported yesterday that Rhode Island plans to renumber all of the exits on its state and federal highways to meet the latest U.S. standard, beginning with Route 295. The new numbering system would number exits not sequentially, with Exit 1 followed by Exit 2 followed by Exit 3, etc., but in reference to mile markers every mile along the highways. For example, the first exit from the beginning of a highway would no longer necessarily be Exit 1 – it might be Exit 2 or Exit 3 depending on whether it is nearest to the 2-mile or the 3-mile marker.

So a sequence of exit signs along a highway might run Exit 2, Exit 5, Exit 7, Exit 12, etc. The old exit numbers will remain posted for about a year after the new exit signs go up. In the Providence Journal’s story “Rhode Island set to renumber all highway exits,” Patrick Anderson writes,

The DOT has not finalized when and in what order the state’s other limited-access highways will get new numbers, but the entire project is expected to be finished by 2020, said agency spokesman Charles St. Martin. The other highways being renumbered are: Routes 95, 195, 4, 10, 24, 37, 78, 403 and the T.F. Green Airport Connector.

Anderson adds:

The logic behind numbering by mile, instead of sequentially, is that it tells drivers the distance to the next exit and allows states to add new exits without having to renumber all the others.

The story does not mention the logic behind the logic for the new exit numbering system, or why signs that read

Exit 7         3 miles

no longer serve the public. Doubtless a committee was formed and assigned to find new and creative methods to expand the federal deficit – I assume all this new signage will be paid for with federal rather than state dollars.

Can’t Rhode Island’s DOT drag its feet on this a little longer? What have they been smoking at the FHA these days?

“Antelope Freeway, 1/4 miles … Antelope Freeway, 1/8 miles … Antelope Freeway, 1/16 miles … Antelope Freeway, 1/32 miles …

***

Here are the current and proposed exits for Route 295 North

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Sir Roger Scruton on beauty

Posted on October 5, 2017 by David Brussat
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Skyline of College Hill, in Providence, epitomizes urban beauty. (Photo by author)

Here is a lovely video of the British philosopher and architectural theorist Roger Scruton called “Why Beauty Matters.” The usefulness of beauty in uplifting human lives serves as the bottom-line rationale for my book Lost Providence, on which I will be speaking very soon at the John Brown House Museum, courtesy of the Rhode Island Historical Society. The event starts at 6 p.m. today but starting at 5 you can roam for free around the beautiful old mansion that so fetched John Quincy Adams. I’ll be lecturing (with slides) in a room whose wallpaper is a lovely mural, but the room may be darkened somewhat, and I cannot promise that all of the images I’ll show will live up to the beauty of the room.

But if you have time, watch “Why Beauty Matters,” from the BBC.

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New teaching in architecture

Posted on October 4, 2017 by David Brussat

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Yesterday’s post, “‘Building Beauty’ in Naples,” discusses a new program of architecture education in Italy that emphasizes beauty. It is mind-boggling that even in Italy an architecture program that emphasizes beauty is news. I issued a tentative warning about the program, invalid I hope, but in doing so I neglected to sufficiently describe the program itself. So here goes.

First off, the University Suor Orsola Benincasa (UniSOB) is surrounded by the old city of Naples, founded as Parthenope or Palaepolis in the 9th century B.C., and subsequently re-established as Neapolis (New City) in 470 B.C. The university sits amid the very beauty that its new “Building Beauty” program was founded to re-establish in architecture. But of course many architecture programs that intend to destroy beauty – yes, intend – are also situated amid lovely settings. Not always are such settings used as models of excellence in design or permitted to impart the wisdom of beauty to students.

Although most modernist architects today are unaware or have forgotten, modern architecture is not just a style but a vital facet of a world view that sees itself as the summit of human progress. Under its domain, obsolete systems of design will, like other traditions, be overtaken and eliminated. This is already happening in almost every field of human endeavor. Why should architecture be any different?

Well, because the obliteration of tradition in architecture reflects erroneous ideas about human nature and human progress whose continuation is dangerous to society. It seems to me that “Building Beauty” must intend to act against that trend in architecture, or it is not really a new system of architectural education, let alone a builder of beauty.

Fortunately, the program does seem to see itself, albeit without really saying so, as reacting against trends in architecture and educational practices that have failed humanity for almost a century by now.

A pamphlet that explains “Building Beauty” reads:

The program emphasizes the generation of beauty by means of the practical work of making; it is offered to all those willing to explore that beauty which makes a difference in the world.

Above all, “Building Beauty” is scientific as opposed to utilitarian. Utility and science are two different things. In its quest for the utility of the machine, modern architecture seeks to don the reputation of science even as it has abandoned the rigor of science. This program will re-embrace science as an ally of nature. Christopher Alexander, as lead developer of the curriculum, is well known for his scientific research into the organic generation of forms at the heart of a living architecture. Science knows that nature copies itself, often making small advances in utility – just as architecture has evolved over centuries of practice. This parallel is at the heart of the new program.

Although technology is an important aspect of building, the conception of what is built is – if I am interpreting the program correctly – more directly tied to the way architecture changes over time as builders develop best practices through trial and error at the level of the construction site. The program incorporates the experience of construction in ways that were long ago abandoned in conventional design education.

No. 9 of the “Building Beauty” program’s 13 principles is:

The “Unfolding” Nature of Beauty Generation Essentially a process of adaptive transformation, making beauty happens in steps whereby each step expands the pre-existent beauty and, in itself, is complete and makes full sense. We test and explore the unfolding nature of beauty generation both in the process of making and in that of teaching how to make.

This is pure Alexander. Clearly, referring back to my warning at the top of this post, a mindset that rejects “mimicry” or “copying the past” as inimical to creativity in design is incompatible with this program. A new program of any sort cannot succeed if it is untrue to itself, so I believe, after reading the materials linked to above, that “Building Beauty” is well founded and likely to succeed, if success is measured in terms of helping students create beauty in the face of the opposition of the architectural establishment.

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“Building Beauty” in Naples

Posted on October 3, 2017 by David Brussat
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University Suor Orsola Benincasa (UniSOB, on Sant’Elmo hill overlooking Naples (UniSOB)

A new architectural program that focuses on beauty, of all things, opens its doors this semester at University Suor Orsola Benincasa, in Naples. The development of the curriculum, known as “Building Beauty,” was led by architect Christopher Alexander, known for his decades of effort to return architecture to its grounding in nature, and back to its centuries-long reliance on beauty as the key to useful buildings.

I’ve been sent several online descriptions and registrations for the new program. They cry out for treatment on this blog. That became more urgent when the program was written up by architect and critic Duo Dickinson on the Common/Edge website, which all too often features writing that claims and sometimes provides a degree of open-mindedness in the vital style war between modernism and new traditional architecture, but whose articles usually sneer at the latter. Dickinson epitomizes that attitude, and so it was worrisome that he writes so glowingly of the new program in Naples.

“Christopher Alexander’s New Architecture Program Offers an Alternative to Style and Orthodoxy” contains Dickinson’s predictable set of elbows to the ribs of new traditional architecture. He urges that “we start teaching that the basis of designing buildings is found in the human capacity to create beauty (versus mimicking a style).” Mimicking a style is code for taking inspiration from historic architecture. It is meant to belittle efforts to turn architecture away from being an abstract exercise and return it to a more hands-on exercise in helping architecture follow where nature leads – efforts that will require major changes in curricula at almost all architecture schools.

Dickinson claims to support such efforts, but that is hard to reconcile with his absurdly narrow definition of creativity, which he seems to think is the opposite of building upon a tradition. For example, he deplores the role of 3D printing, which has

made the reanimation of long dead buildings and their designs a disturbing reality: like building a new McKim, Mead, and White Penn Station in New York. Creativity becomes a thing of the past: literally.

Really? It is amazing how an educated person can continue to hold that the only valid definition of creativity in architecture is to make a new building that is even wackier than the last sensational, gravity-defying edifice. The idea of rebuilding Penn Station in its original McKim, Mead & White style contains so much opportunity for advanced creativity that it’s difficult to enumerate. How to use new materials to recreate the beauty of McKim’s natural stonework; how to adapt the 1910 station plan to the many changes in human behavior, commercial practices, transportation innovation, etc.; not to mention how to invent novel orders of embellishment that pick up on our diverse American culture, and yet nevertheless fit into the hierarchy of ornamental features common to classical architecture. (Think of Benjamin Latrobe’s corncob capitals in the U.S. Capitol’s Hall of Columns.)

It takes real creativity to imagine plausible reasons to deny the creativity of using the past to inspire the future, and in particular a project like rebuilding old Penn Station – something that millions will love – in the face of a stodgy modernist establishment. Sorry, Duo. We know you are not stupid, but your plausibility here is nil. This does not wash.

In light of these and other prejudices in his article, Dickinson’s praise of Alexander’s new program in Naples could undermine its prospects for success. A new kind of architecture education would bring genuine choice for students who seek the option of a traditional curriculum. A student who reads Dickinson’s praise of the program with his denigration of traditional sensibilities might decide not to apply to the new program. Maybe, such a student might think, Alexander’s reputation as a traditionalist is overblown. I’m not sure I’d go so far as to suggest that this is Dickinson’s intent.

It is possible to suppose that Dickinson has had a change of heart that has opened his mind to evening the playing field in architecture so that new traditional proposals have a chance to thrive in a profession still absolutely dominated by modern architecture. His slurs against new traditional could be read as efforts to maintain his professional street cred, even as he inches ever closer to apostasy. I like this view, because it would validate some of the interesting points his article makes.

So here is hoping that the new program for “Building Beauty” through architecture, in Naples, is, like the programs at Notre Dame and a handful of other schools, the real deal – a genuine alternative to a modernist-based architectural education.

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Shepley Library addendum

Posted on October 2, 2017 by David Brussat

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Correspondents have weighed in on the Shepley Library, and perhaps the most interesting suggestion comes from Peter Van Erp, who contends that the Shepley Library was not on what are now the grounds of the John Brown House. In fact, the passage from Providence’s Benefit Street that I interpreted as saying so does not necessarily say so.

Attributed by authors Ellysa Tardif and Peggy Chang to historian Margaret Stillwell, the passage reads: “… just beyond the John Brown House stood a ‘little building put up by Colonel George Shepley to house his collection of Rhode Island books, prints, and manuscripts’” Arguably, “just beyond the John Brown House” could mean a distance beyond the Brown House compound. The address 292 Benefit is indeed a block north and on the opposite side of Benefit from the compound.

In fact, 292 Benefit still exists, though it is not listed in the 1985 architectural survey by the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission. And as Peter points out, the land on which the library would have sat is in fact a parking lot – across the street from my first tiny apartment (1984-90) in Providence, directly north of the Hope Club parking lot (occupied until 1960 by 2 Benevolent St. on the map at the bottom of this post). Below is the Shepley House at 292 in a photograph from a real-estate website. Notice that it has the same ornate entrance portico as the one to the far left of the photo, above, of the Shepley Library and Shepley House.

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It is definitely the same house. Below is a detail from my 1895 plat map expanded to the area just north of yesterday’s map. So now we have moved closer to solving our mystery of the Shepley Library. Much remains to be learned, but we now know where it is, or was. Many thanks, Peter, for your excellent architectural detective work!

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Shepley Library on Benefit?

Posted on October 1, 2017 by David Brussat

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“This is a rear view of the Shepley Library at 292 Benefit Street. [Historian] Margaret Stillwell … recalls that just beyond the John Brown House stood a ‘little building put up by Colonel George Shepley to house his collection of Rhode Island books, prints, and manuscripts'” (Providence’s Benefit Street)

Lost Providence ought to have included the Shepley Library, formerly on the grounds of the John Brown House between Charlesfield and Power on Benefit Street. It appears to have been built just before or just after the turn of the 19th century. I was unaware of its existence until after I wrote my book, when I purchased Providence’s Benefit Street, by Elyssa Tardif and Peggy Chang. When their book was published in 2013 by my own publisher, History Press, Tardif was on staff at the Rhode Island Historical Society, at whose Brown House Museum I’ll be speaking on Thursday evening.

The revelation that such a library existed raises numerous questions. When was it built? When was it lost? Was another house demolished to make way for the library? The caption to another shot of the library reads: “The image below, undated, shows the front of the Shepley Library at 292 Benefit Street.”

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The database text for the same image in the online archive of the Providence Public Library reads: “Image shows the Shepley Library on Benefit Street. The library appears to be an addition built onto the Shepley House. A car is parked outside the library. Library no longer stands” The detail below of my 1895 plat map of the southern portion of College Hill and Fox Point shows a house at the sharp corner of the block that may be the library, with the Shepley House (the colonel’s residence) just above it along Charlesfield. If so, and if the front is indeed on Benefit, then it is hard to tell how the Shepley House fits to its left in the photo above.

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Of course, the map or the book may be wrong, or I may be incorrect in my belief that the map is from 1895. If so, the footprint that looks like it may be the Shepley Library might also be a house that could have been razed to build the library. Or maybe it is the library but the mapmakers got the footprint wrong, or maybe the library underwent renovations that changed the shape of its footprint.

Other buildings that I perhaps ought to have included in Lost Providence include the city’s first train station, designed by Thomas Tefft, from 1848, and the Hospital Trust Bank Building, completed in 1891. The lifespan and location of each are considerably less indeterminate than those of the Shepley Library. No doubt also my investigation into the library represents a regrettably limited effort of sleuthery by the author of Lost Providence. I hope someone will provide additional (and more reliable) information – perhaps during my evening at the John Brown House on Thursday. I look forward to writing a more satisfying addendum to this report.

[The day after uploading this post I published “Shepley Library addendum,” which updates readers on the former library’s actual location.]

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