More Storage, Less Livable City – Architecture Critic Morgan

More Storage, Less Livable City – Architecture Critic Morgan

    

Providence had a weight problem, or rather a size problem. Not that bigger isn’t better in some instances, but it seems that whenever a new project is proposed for the city it is over-scaled, physically too much building–whether a skyscraper in the Innovation District, the student ghetto planned for Wickenden Street, or the “stumpy” apartment blocks being thrown up everywhere. Now, we are asked to absorb a 73-feet tall, 1,399-unit, 132,000 square-feet storage facility on Branch Avenue across from the North Burial Ground.

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That Trunk Space LLC’s scheme was recommended by the City Plan Commission should raise red flags everywhere. This behemoth is planned for one of the busiest intersections in Providence. Its height will overwhelm its slowly resuscitating commercial area, and it will bring nothing attractive to the North Main Street neighborhood. Nor will it contribute the kind of non-transitory human activity that the area so desperately needs. Does the planning commission consider only how such a Gordo intrusion will benefit the developers?  Is there ever a discussion of how such a monster will impact its surroundings, the city, or the entire commonweal? How could such putative professionals, tasked with guiding Providence growth, shamefacedly approve a landscape plan that will put only eight trees on a 35,000 square-foot lot?

 

 

 

Storage is becoming a huge business in an ever-more peripatetic America. And what an appealing business model: build a shed, maybe add climate control, assume limited maintenance, and watch the rent money roll in. One can hardly blame a company like Trunk Space for wanting to cash in on our national inability to deal with its “stuff.” Never mind that they come from Quincy, a city that has choked itself on an explosion of undistinguished apartment blocks with all the appeal of Soviet-era housing. The questions the city planners should have asked Trunk Space is: What good will you bring to Providence? How will your outsize attic contribute to the quality of life here? Aside from storage, will their architects, BL Companies–with its touted “design expertise, technical knowledge, aesthetic sensibilities”–give our city an exceptional architectural addition to our skyline?

 

 

 

This site’s “heavy commercial zone” allows a building height of only 50 feet, so the developers requested a variance. They agreed to preserve the brick street front of the former Board of Elections building in exchange for being allowed to go up to 73 feet. What kind of deal is that? The existing brick office and former manufacturing block, while altered over its life, is a worthy piece of commercial architecture. A responsible developer would, as a matter of course, incorporate as much of the street-facing facade of the old building as possible; at least the dramatic chimney will be saved. The developers also agreed to add more windows–to make the flat, untextured metals walls seem more welcoming, more domestic, and more amenable?

 

 

Granted, a professional rendering can be very misleading. From those presented to the planning commission, it is difficult to tell what the completed building will really look like. Except for the brick on the Branch Avenue front, there are no surfaces that aspire to anything more than the least expensive wall covering. And what about the overbearing new addition’s presence? Will it throw shadows on the strip of shops that replaced Benny’s, the Dryden Mill rehabilitation project, or on North Burial Ground? Will it be lit at night? Or will it just be a dark looming, uninhabited storage box. The Providence Renaissance was based in large part on the success of historic preservation. But such marshalling of cultural resources means more than just singling out the obvious individual historic homes. It means embracing the entire urban fabric, including the streets, the spaces between buildings, and views.

 

 

 

 

Branch Avenue and North Main Street form a significant intersection; as a junction with the interstate, it is one of the entrances to the city. Will this single-use, non-contributing leviathan be a stumbling block to the development of the North Main Street corridor? Except for the income the owners will derive, and the convenience for those unwilling to drive a little further out of town to dump their old computer consoles and outdated clothes, the City of Providence has been sold another turkey.