Architecture Critic Will Morgan's Naughty and Nice List for 2021
Will Morgan, Architecture Critic
Architecture Critic Will Morgan's Naughty and Nice List for 2021
The nationally recognized architecture expert has looked at the best and the worst of Rhode Island's design over the past five years.
This year's columns were amazingly poignant, taking a look at how architecture impacts the world around us -- for better or for worse.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTTake a tour of Morgan's 2021 columns -- and who was naughty and nice in the world of design and architecture.
Architecture Critic Will Morgan's Naughty and Nice List for 2021
Naughty
Worcester’s Polar Park Is Underwhelming at $160 Million
Baseball is returning to the Blackstone River Valley. On Tuesday, the Worcester Woo Sox host the Syracuse Mets for the season opener at Polar Park, the spanking new home of the Boston Red Sox farm team. The stadium that cost more than $160 million also highlights the failure of a silver-bullet sports arena to reverse inner-city decline.
Naughty
Cathedral Square: Hideous Present, Glorious Future
Cathedral Square is one of the dreariest places in downtown Providence. An area that ought to be the heart of the city is instead an empty, forlorn, thoroughly unwelcoming, and hostile “civic” space. Half a century after an internationally famous architect and a nationally recognized landscape firm designed and fashioned it, Cathedral Square is an embarrassing urban disaster.
READ THE REST OF THE COLUMN HERE
Naughty
Goodbye Green, Hello Asphalt: The Death of Metacomet Golf Club
Does East Providence have a death wish? The City Council's approval of development plans for the 138-acre Metacomet Gold Club to be destroyed for a shopping center with apartments, offices, and restaurants has to rank as one of the biggest planning blunders since the city allowed itself to be cut in half by Interstate 195 in the 1960s.
READ THE REST OF THE COLUMN HERE
Naughty
Another Misstep From the 195 Commission
Why does almost everything that the I-195 Commission touches turn out to be architecturally second rate? How long will Providence continue to suffer from an agency that has failed to provide design leadership for a hugely significant piece of downtown development?
Naughty
Are We Designing Better Looking Parking Garages Than Hotels
The new hotel in Providence's ironically named "Innovation & Design District" is a real dud. While we are happy to welcome a new hostelry, as well as another finished piece in the I-195 Development scheme, the soon-to-be-completed Aloft Hotel on Dyer–Street is a major architectural disappointment.
Naughty
The Mauling of Thayer Street
Thayer Street "is a vibrant and constantly evolving area," according to the Providence-Warwick Convention & Visitors Bureau. "The neighborhood caters to the college crowd but it also beloved by academics and locals." The Bureau continues, "Thayer consistently refreshes its offerings to stay current and engaging in the community." That statement is six years old, causing one to wonder if anyone from the Convention Bureau has been back to Thayer Street since. A more accurate description of Brown’s once appealing commercial area would describe it as a seedy slice of Times Square.
The college strip has always been a mixed delight for the city watcher. Anytime Carolyn and I were traveling across the country, we would head for a university town, hoping for an oasis in a desert of fast food and sameness. We reasoned that campuses invariably had an area close by where you could get a good pizza, and in years past, find a health food store, tobacconist, a florist, a vintage clothier, and a good bookstore.
Naughty
A New Domestic Style for Our Cheap Age
Ubiquibox is a style name I am giving to those ubiquitous box-shaped apartments that are invading the East Side of Providence. The shapeless, undecorated container is the perfect metaphor for the 2020s and our race to the bottom, turning away from our city's rich heritage of domestic architecture.
Naughty
Assault on Wayland Square
Will success spoil Wayland Square? If we want to visualize the tragically overbuilt future of the commercial heart of this East Side neighborhood we need only look at the design of the proposed apartment block that will replace the nearly century-old Monahan Drabble & Sherman Funeral Home. (The venerable undertakers have moved to East Providence.)
Other than the guiding principles for the continued erosion of Wayland Square–the need for housing and unalloyed greed, can a case be made for the insertion of a scale-destroying five-story behemoth in what has been hailed as one of the most desirable neighborhoods anywhere? How will 230 Waterman, with its 38 flats and some retail space in a thoroughly undistinguished package, contribute anything more than traffic congestion, shadows, and a diminution of the quality of life?
Nice
The Beatrice Hotel Embraces Downtown
The Beatrice Hotel is a jewel. The boutique hotel that opened in downtown Providence on September 1st is the kind of hostelry that our historic city deserves, but rarely gets. Realized in a restored 19th-century bank, the Beatrice is in triumphant contrast to the recent uninspiring new chain hotels, such as the Residence Inn, Aloft, and Homewood Suites. Developer and former mayor Joseph Paolino, Jr. rescued and revitalized the Exchange Bank, a handsome, five-story commercial block. This hotel shows how we can create desirable business spaces that enrich the cultural landscape of the city.
Nice
Narragansett Brewery: Fox Point Winner
The century-old brewery in Cranston, which at one time employed 850 workers and in 1915 was the largest brewery in New England, was razed in 1998. The name survived, but the beer was brewed as far away as Lacrosse, Wisconsin and Ft. Wayne, Indiana, absurdly dislocated from its eponymous home, and it just wasn’t the same. Thanks to Mark Hellendrung, Narragansett Beer is back in the Ocean State, and its new home is a notable architectural addition to our harbor front.
READ THE REST OF THE STORY HERE
Nice
Townie Pride: East Providence High School
Where would you go to experience "the most outstanding high school project in the Northeast"? Would you have guessed East Providence? Even making allowances for the architect's rightful boast, the Townies have a lot of which to be proud. The new high school on Pawtucket Avenue is another example of how the city across the Seekonk is quietly embracing the future.
Nice
Is Hope Street the Perfect Urban Main Street?
From Hope High School to Lippitt Park, this thoroughfare demonstrates how a street can form a vibrant town within a city. Carolyn, and I pondered this question dining at Avenue N, as we celebrated the lifting of covid restrictions. As we ate, we watched our town opening up along Hope Street, the spine of Providence's East Side.
Streets are more than just traffic arteries. Streets are basic units of city planning. The pandemic reinforced this, as people were forced outside to dine. Overnight we adopted the European al fresco tradition, as if we had always occupied the sidewalk to eat and socialize. This simple change re-connected people with the street, and re-affirmed a tenet of citizen-driven planning.
Nice
Dye House: Providence’s Daring New Hotel
The Dye House is a daring new hotel in Providence. Situated in Olneyville, it shines a light on that neglected yet vibrant part of town. And, it points up the sadly pedestrian nature of most hotels recently erected in the city. With only four rooms, the intriguing Dye House is a reminder that size does not matter, and that often small can be beautiful.
Nice
The Antidote to the Seaside McMansion
A recent house on a five-acre pasture on Conanicut Island challenges the usual norm that successful and wealthy patrons build only bloated castles along the shore.
The Newport architectural firm founded by James Estes and Peter Twombly over two decades ago (now with the added partner of Adam Titrington), have long been the designers to go to for homes that captured both the best of Modernism and the Rhode Island vernacular. Their work is environmentally sensitive, integrated with the land, handsome, and above all modest.
