Architecture Here and There

Illustrations: Above, William Morgan in the Beneficent Congregational Church; below, exterior view of Round Top, Waterplace Luxury Condominium towers, Antoinette Downing, doyenne of preservation in Providence and a founder of Providence Preservation Society

* * *

William Morgan sounded a rousing trumpet for historic preservation at the Providence Preservation Society's annual meeting last Thursday. The setting was Beneficent Congregational Church, or "Round Top," as it's known, on downtown's Weybosset Street.

Round Top was built in 1809 to replace a plain, steepled meeting house with a more ambitious edifice topped by a gilded dome. It was renovated in 1836 by James Bucklin. He added to the dome a lantern with eight pilasters on which sits a roof surmounted by a Corinthian column. He replaced the slender Adamesque pillars of the original portico with massive, fluted pillars of Doric monumentality, among other exterior changes. In 1923, John D. Rockefeller Jr. hired his wife's brother, architect William Aldrich, to design a new, more ornamental chancel inside for the altar and pulpit, in front of which Will Morgan addressed the society.

Morgan's lecture was witty, erudite and pushed all the right buttons for his audience. He praised the society's role in preserving the architectural heritage of Providence, and even showed a slide of the ugly modernist condo towers at Waterplace Park. "Why do you laugh?" he wondered in mock puzzlement at the tittering -- the sort of moment that arrives in all speeches of this kind. "Buildings that look like everywhere else do Providence no favors," he said in concluding his lecture.

Morgan is a contributor to these commentary pages. We share tart, bantering disagreement on architecture by e-mail -- a disputatiousness that continues in more friendly tones when we share lunch. I keep up with his wry, amusing but debatable dispatches to editor Robert Whitcomb's "This New England" blog -- including his latest, a post in which he twits Round Top's enrichment by the Rockefellers, which, he says, "dismissed" its "quintessential New England spirit."

I do not intend to dispute this characterization, which Morgan repeated in his lecture. He is, after all, an architectural historian and I am just a newspaperman. But his comments reflect a scholarly historicism that most people don't see when they view buildings. They see buildings in whole, to be liked or disliked in their entirety, rather than as a series of changes over time, "authentic" or otherwise. Most visitors to Round Top see a beautiful church, and many would say of the Rockefeller renovations that they added to its beauty.

Architectural scholarship helps to untangle the history and meaning of buildings, but professional preservationists mistake its purpose, and in so doing undermine what should be their chief mission. They treat a city like a museum, fetishizing architectural styles as if preservation were a curatorial exercise rather than an effort to protect and promote civic beauty handed down by history.

Morgan's remarks, for all their erudition, largely catered to the membership's architectural populism -- its preference for traditional over modernist buildings. But the society, under a succession of boards and executive directors, has done very little in recent years to oppose buildings that "look like everywhere else." Its reluctance to challenge new architecture that erodes the historic character of the city that inspired the society's creation in 1956 has done Providence no favors.

Back then, as Morgan reminded his listeners, preservation was a hobby of little old ladies eager to preserve any house where George Washington slept. After the society's creation, its efforts came to include the preservation of whole neighborhoods, such as College Hill. Morgan and his family moved from Louisville, Ky., to Providence because, as he said, it wasn't one of those places "whose people bombed their own cities."

What Morgan left out is that preservation became a national movement -- pioneered in Providence by Antoinette Downing [left], among others -- because Americans feared, for the first time in U.S. history, that any building torn down would be replaced by something ugly. While old buildings are somewhat safer today, modern architecture still threatens their setting -- and the society does not seem to have a problem with that.

Will Morgan's lecture gives me an excellent opportunity to introduce Steven Semes's pathbreaking new book, The Future of the Past. The book will help PPS members understand why the Providence Preservation Society has lost its way. Why is a great institution so eager to protect ugly gas stations and produce terminals when it should be protecting beautiful old buildings from ugly additions and promoting new buildings that enhance the settings of the buildings it protects? Why isn't that gospel in Providence, of all places?

A discussion of these issues should help members and the public participate in choosing the society's next director -- a post vacant for almost a year. That discussion will begin with an examination of The Future of the Past next week.

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  Beneficent Congregational Church Providence Preservation Society Providence RI William Morgan

Leave a comment

Name:

Email:

URL:  

Remember personal info?

Captcha:

Type the characters you see in the picture above.