Pawtucket Modern–Architecture Critic Morgan

Pawtucket Modern–Architecture Critic Morgan

Frank Lloyd Wright was the most famous architect to have ever called Pawtucket home, but he never built anything here. Yet, the town that bills itself as “Where Modern America Was Born,” has some incredible 20th-century architecture that could to be the envy of any small city in the country. Despite Interstate 95, which severed downtown like a Rhode Island version of the Berlin Wall, Pawtucket’s architectural heritage reminds us that the birthplace of the industrial revolution was once important, wealthy, and stylish.

 

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The jewel of Pawtucket civic buildings is the library, a turn-of-the-20th-century landmark by the Boston firm of Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson, who soon thereafter won the competition for a new campus at West Point. Like Wright, Ralph Adams Cram–perhaps the most famous architect America forgot–made the cover of Time magazine. He is best known for his Gothic churches and colleges, so the Pawtucket library is one of his rare Greek works. Beyond the Ionic columns, the library is composed of simple, blocky masses that do not rely on decoration to make a surprisingly clean, even modern, building for 1902.

 

 

More in the spirit of the era is the decorative panels above the main windows. These depict the march of civilization: the ancient world of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, along with Shakespearean and Wagnerian heroes. These represent the first major work of Lee Lawrie, who went onto fame as the chief sculptor at Rockefeller Center in New York–everyone knows his “Atlas” and the god-like “Wisdom” over the entrance to 30 Rock.

 

 

The design team for Rockefeller Center was led by Raymond Hood. One of this country’s great skyscraper designers, Hood was a native of Pawtucket and a Brown graduate, who began his career working for Cram.

 

During the 1930s Pawtucket saw its share of snazzy, light-hearted buildings. “New England’s Largest Drive-In Service Station” gathers its fun from what seems a combination of Chinese, Indian, and Maya temples.

 

 

Two of Pawtucket’s magnificent Art Deco structures are City Hall and Shea High School, both by local architect John F. O’Malley. Brown architectural historian, William Jordy, decried the tower as “an extravagant folly to civic grandeur,” but the architect created a skyscraper-like tower with minimal decoration (four metal eagles on the tower were later removed). Far richer is Shea High school, a Public Works Administration project that left no surface undecorated, with inspirational quotes making the entire composition an educational canvas. Contrasting with the virtues are what might be called student vices of insolence, indifference, lawlessness, fear, and carelessness.

Pawtucket’s best-known example of Depression Deco style is the Modern Diner, with its automotive and airplane-derived streamlining. Even though re-located from downtown, its r glass block cowcatcher and curved prow still cut through the wind.

 

    

The most unsung modern landmark in Pawtucket, is also my favorite: the Lustron house in the Darlington neighborhood. The modern materials that once gave the diner its pizzazz were put to use during the Second World War, but they were not a significant contribution to the post-war housing boom. There were few brave builders who applied the lessons of modernity and war production to domestic design. Farm machinery manufacturer Carl Strandlund wanted to do for housing what General Motors had done for the automobile. His all-steel Lustron house came off an assembly line, was trucked to the site, assembled in a couple of days using only wrenches and screwdrivers, and touted as virtually maintenance-free. Alas, returning G.I.s and their families wanted wooden houses in traditional styles, and only 2498 Lustrons were built between 1948 and 1950. Thus, the well-preserved example in Pawtucket is an important piece of American housing history.

 

The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright was a staple of critic Morgan’s teaching at schools such as Princeton, Louisville, and Roger Williams.