The Death and Life of Providence Place – Architecture Critic Will Morgan
Will Morgan, Architecture Critic
The Death and Life of Providence Place – Architecture Critic Will Morgan
If you have not been to Providence Place in a while — why would you go? You may be unaware that the mall is in trouble. The 1,400,000 square-feet of retail space, a grand-strategy to counter the decline of downtown Providence in the 1990s, is itself in decline; it is on life support and someone should pull the plug. So many events have conspired to torpedo Providence Place–internet sales, Covid, buyer ennui, and not least of all that the suburban-shopping-emporium under-one-roof idea was already decades out of date when it opened in 1999.
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The solution to downtown Providence’s seeming inability to compete with commercial sprawl in Warwick, Seekonk, and Attleboro opened a month after Carolyn and I moved here from Louisville, Kentucky, another city struggling with how to save its historic core. Despite the hoopla surrounding the unveiling of the Woonasquatucket-spanning behemoth, Providence Place was not a draw for us. For a while, it was safe, clean, and reasonably convenient (albeit with a dark, scary garage), but it never supplied a unique urban experience. Malls, their proponents claimed, recreated an American main street, yet there was no way a sealed box could recreate the excitement, scale, intimacy, or serendipity of a vibrant downtown.
Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, Providence’s commercial heart — the cluster of tall buildings at the river and along Westminster, Weybossett, and Washington Streets — was indeed hurting (although much of its historical building stock remained thanks due to various recessions and a “lack of progress”). One solution, we thought, would have been to insert the mall shops behind the facades of the older and historic buildings along those streets. Providence Place, however, failed my new architecture test: How far would you travel to see this building? Would you go to Europe to spend time in the mall?
The design for the mall was originally penned by Skidmore Owings & Merrill, once one of America’s leading Modern architecture firms. For Providence, however, SOM principal Adrian Smith came up with a scheme echoing the giant department stores of London and Paris at the beginning of the 20th Century. It was a Potemkin village–just Postmodern facades in front of an open steel-cage interior. (Smith had destroyed a historic chunk of downtown Louisville with an even less-inspired design called the Galleria, which went bust.) In 1995, Governor Lincoln Almond asked the internationally famous architect Friedrich St. Florian to complete the stalled project.
As talented as the former RISD dean is, the half-designed Providence Place was a dog’s breakfast, a minefield for any architect. To begin with, the so-called anchor stores of Lord & Taylor and Nordstrom were weirdly allowed to design their own exterior packages, with predictably dreary results. No matter how heroically St. Florian wrestled with improving the developer’s earlier design, the basic wrongness of the concept could only be partially mitigated. The tragedy was that St. Florian was not hired to design the entire mall in the first place. (Smith, meanwhile, went on to design the world’s tallest building, Dubai’s answer to the Fane Tower). Nevertheless, St. Florian opened up SOM’s chaotic interior with the monumental Wintergarden, filling the space with light and recalling the great 19th-century indoor shopping arcades in cities like Milan and Naples. The best feature, however, may be the yellow Skybridge, which allows numbed shoppers to escape back toward the city.
This review may seem like ancient history, yet we need to understand the follies and successes of the past. (We might reach farther back to remember the Providence Arcade, the nation’s first enclosed shopping mall.) What is to happen to the soon-to-shuttered Providence Place? Housing is the current buzzword. But rather than fumbling into a solution piecemeal, as unfortunately happened with the development of the 195 land, why not hold a competition to solicit innovative solutions from around the globe for repurposing the mall? Let talented designers suggest imaginative solutions that we might never think of–a velodrome, an opera house, a hospital, a university, a new city hall, a library, laboratories. This would put Providence on the design map and demonstrate that we are more than just “competent” and that we really are one of the most creative cities anywhere.
