I don’t know Providence well enough to talk about the character of the city. Like a lot of small cities in the northeast, it’s had to move from manufacturing to a service economy, a transition that has probably been eased by the presence of several large educational institutions. A good percentage of the buildings downtown …
There are long treatises on the topic of the aesthetics of the machine age, starting in the nineteenth century and working their way up to the present. That topic includes everything from the precisionists to steampunk. Great stuff, but not what I want to talk about. The machine-made mass production of architectural elements in the …
Sometimes you just don’t need the old doors any more. That’s the side facade of the Joyce Theater. We’ve got three infill areas of brick: The former ordinary door a few feet to the right of where the fancy front-facade veneer ends. The door was a step up from the sidewalk and the granite step …
I try not to shy away from unpleasant topics here, so I have to admit that’s me on my first facade project in 1988. What was going through my head at that moment was something along the lines of “What am I supposed to do about that?” but I did eventually figure out how to …
In a way, that’s the best ghost picture I’ve taken. It’s another old one, but it shows clearly how this phenomenon occurs. Here are the demonstrable facts: The building on the left is an architecturally-forgettable hotel constructed in 2001. The building on the right is a generic NY loft building constructed in 1918. Here are …
