Architecture Here and There

Proposed Granoff Center for the Creative Arts

THE INVASION OF PROVIDENCE by modern architecture continues apace. Your embattled correspondent dares not peep out of his foxhole. The uglitarians are inside the gates. This reporter will meet the assault with bullets. That way he can mow down a whole platoon of modernist buildings with just one column. (A "bullet" is printers' jargon for the dot that introduces each of the frightening descriptions that follow.)

• Granoff Creative Arts Center. Brown University hired the firm that designed Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Their design will further erode Brown's tottering endowment. Another ugly building is sure to put a damper on future alumni donations. It will be made of glass and zinc. Zinc! In a number of ways the design copies the past (alas, the recent past), but it breaks with modernist orthodoxy by stacking glass boxes so that the floorplates do not line up. Impressive!

At least Diller Scofidio + Renfro refrained from inflicting on Angell Street the sort of unsupported structural overhang they inflicted on Boston art patrons. Such frightful engineering has become a modernist cliché. Their restraint at Brown merits applause. The art will be unsettling enough.

Endowment angst deep-sixed Brown's proposed Mindless Brain Behavior Center, also on Angell. That saved the Urban Environmental Lab and two Victorians. But the block's beauty was already a historical memory. Whether a once-attractive streetscape is two thirds traditional and one third modern or two thirds modern and one third traditional makes little difference. Maybe Brown's endowment crisis can still kill the CAC. Then they could bring back the old Shell station, which at least was useful.

• Providence Career & Technical Academy. Almost finished next door to the Central/Classical High complex, this huge building boasts corrugated steel, sharp angles, skewed surfaces, arrhythmic fenestration and windows that zip around corners. At least there's no zinc. Only cheapo materials need apply. Providence had avoided major buildings of this deconstructivist style, whose heyday was in the 1990s, before Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao.

Central High is classical and Classical High is Brutalist. The Career & Technical Academy looks like a high school on crack cocaine. Great! That'll really contribute to an ambiance conducive to study! What was the school board thinking? A little more confusion for the Providence schools, anyone?

• Nulman Lewis Student Center. The Wheeler School's RISD Chace Center wannabe.

In architecture, copying the past is the sincerest form of flattery. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was the father of the glass box office tower. Imitators were called Mieslings, and their work bored the life out of whole streets, such as Park Avenue, in New York City. Rafael Moneo, the Chace Center architect, won the 1996 Pritzker Prize. Moneo's work has spawned a crop of Moneolings to disfigure Providence.

Wheeler's board obviously wanted to impress the student body by seeming to be hip. Shhh! Don't anyone tell them they actually seem ridiculous.

• House, 127 Pratt St. Providence architect Friedrich St. Florian's RISD Chace Center wannabe.

St. Florian designed Providence Place here and the National World War II Memorial on the Mall in Washington. To do so, he jettisoned his youthful modernism, during which phase he drew a lot and built a modernist house for himself on the East Side. That house displayed a commendable willingness to endure what he has failed to inflict on others. Having succeeded in traditional architectural styles, he now has ARRG Syndrome: Architects' Reputation Recovery Gambit, which at 127 Pratt takes on a Moneolingist form. Arrgh! Poor Friedrich! Get well soon!

• The Box Office is a proposed three-story building of 36 recycled steel shipping containers. Instant slums. Maybe that works for Olneyville. The young developers of this project wondered: With shipping containers piling up in ports, why not use them as buildings? Which makes me wonder: Why not leave them piled up in ports, where they will come in handy as shipping containers after the recession?

• Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Rhode Island Headquarters, in Capital Center, is by far the best modern architecture seen in Providence since Old Stone Square (1984), which was good modernism (that is, truly creative, albeit unlovely) in a bad location. Okay, so the style of the BC/BS-RI HQ lacks originality -- every American city has its own curved corporate monolith nowadays. Yet its curves soften the bluntness of its uglier modernist neighbors. It follows the Hippocratic Oath. Except for blocking more views of the State House, it does little harm, since the Capital Center District is already an aesthetic corpse.

In sum, modern architects declare: Thou shalt not copy the past. Only traditionalists do that! But all of modern architecture is one large collection of copies, knockoffs and wannabes, with its designers in full denial. That's why modernists take a Hypocritic Oath. And life in my foxhole only gets worse!

David Brussat is a member of The Journal's editorial board (dbrussat@projo.com). His projo.com blog is called Architecture Here and There.

 Tags  Diller Scofidio + Renfro Friedrich St. Florian modern architecture Providence RI

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