How to Do New Apartment Buildings Right–Architecture Critic Will Morgan

How to Do New Apartment Buildings Right–Architecture Critic Will Morgan

 

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Minor miracles can become major triumphs when good architects and aspirational developers work together. Sometimes, a single duplex can show up the greed-fueled housing that has benighted so much of downtown Providence and the East Side. The pair of apartments nearing completion on the corner of Friendship Street and Interstate 95 stands as a beacon in the shadow cast by the overarching mediocrity of the ironically named Innovation District.

 

Like a trojan horse, 285 Friendship Street snuck up on the city. It was built on just another empty lot, such as the kind that blights the West Side and Smith Hill. Not pausing to look, drivers simply whip by on the Partington Way access road, edging for entry to Interstate 95 or vying for a spot in the Washington Bridge back-up. That the two-unit block has gone almost unnoticed is attested to by the fact that no one has asked GoLocal’s architecture critic what he thinks of the ugly black box/the elegant modern cube suggests that the new residences have gone unnoticed. But these apartments deserve more than a passing glimpse.

 

The architects of this surprising and significant townscape infill are Yasmin Vobis and Aaron Forrest, partners of the firm Ultramoderne, founded a decade ago when these Princeton-trained principals were teaching at RISD. Stretched between teaching and establishing a professional career, their early work was often academic exercises, competition entries, or urban interventions, rather than large commissions. They also published the book Vacant Providence, which is a thoughtful study of a baker’s dozen of modern designs by noted architects such as Friedrich St. Florian, Paul Rudolph, and I .M. Pei. Forrest and Vobis now teach at the University of California, Berkeley, and their firm’s work is mostly San Francisco-focused.

 

When the Boston investment analyst and Providence developer, Sivakumar Batthala bought the empty lot, he knew that he wanted to work with an avant-garde design firm. An internet search for  “ultra-modern architecture in Providence” brought him to Ultramoderne. The Bay Area architects and the University of Chicago M.B.A. are an unusual but successful combination. The designers and their partner were inspired by the challenge of such “a difficult site.” Forrest told GoLocal that “quality in housing” that was also “low budget” was what drove this design. The developer-builder is also thrifty, open to using unplanned-for but serendipitously available building materials, such as the heavily-corrugated external siding from China or the surplus ambrosia-maple flooring found in a Massachusetts lumberyard.

 

 

285 Friendship takes up all of the allowable lot coverage to provide dual 2,256-square-feet apartments, each with four bedrooms and a single-car garage (they will rent for about $4,000 a month). But the similarity with Providence ubiquiboxes ends there. Ultramoderne’s goal, according to Vobis, is “refiguring the basic ingredients in a project to create generous spaces and ample access to light.” The living room-kitchen on the third floor consists of a 17-foot tall cube that soars, providing a spiritually elevated and light-filled heart of the home. It is reminiscent of the quintessential artist‘s studio, as found in Paris in the 1920s or post-war Greenwich Village. The windows here are 8-feet-square, some triple-glazed, some with translucent corrugated fiberglass, offering various options for opacity or clear views. Not only are the occupants above the highway, the apartments are constructed to be eerily quiet. There is an open roof-top space for an alfresco experience.

 

 

 

Interstate 95 cuts Providence in two, our own Berlin Wall, dividing the East and West Sides. Yet, looking beyond the highway to downtown and College Hill, these apartments provide spectacular city prospects. Like the Japanese concept of the borrowed view, one’s eyes ignore the freeway and gravitate to the skyline.

 

The developer’s courage in transforming this unlikely spot, combined with Ultramoderne’s ability to create such urbane and sophisticated residences, demonstrates how an intelligent, modestly-sized approach to solving an urban problem can be more successful than squeezing all the history, grace, and potential from a prime location.

    

This Friendship formula is being applied to a larger apartment block at 536 Smith Street, which will offer eleven rental units and a small retail space. Here again, this team is enriching a somewhat disadvantaged area, in contrast to the East Side developers whose new apartment blocks are lowering the cultural value of already well-endowed neighborhoods.

 

 

Editor's Note: An earlier version listed the Smith Street property at 356, the correct address is 536.