The hotel plan by the Procaccianti Group Inc. [...] is being welcomed by construction-trades unions, city officials and surrounding business owners. But Ned Connors, an architect and historian of the Weybosset urban renewal project, says he will miss the Fogarty building.
It’s not ugly, he said, it’s just … different. At about 50 years old, he said the Fogarty building is in the most dangerous time in a structure's life: when it’s too old to be hip but too young to be venerated.
— providencejournal.com
Sadly the architectural design of the proposed extended stay high-rise hotel that has been OKed by Providence City Council last December to replace the Fogarty building could not be any more generic and bland.
What do you think, Archinectors? Do we have Providence locals here among our readers that can share their memories of the Fogarty's glory days?
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19 Comments
That hotel design is terrible.
Eh, the Brutalism brand is not a measure of quality. Each building is its own thing... This one is so so.
The Brutalist Movement Supplanted by The Dryvit Movement…
…can people not save or reuse anything? It’s like we are moving back into the days of “Urban Renewal”.
Progress is defined as destroying the perfectly good and serviceable because more money can be squeezed out of it. Anything done solely for money is guaranteed to be shit.
But thankfully we are fully staffed with aesthetes who readily judge value based upon appearance.
The Brutalist building is shit, but the Marriott that will be replacing it is 100x shittier...
As Charles Darwent just said on Twitter, regarding another Brutalist lovely being torn down, it will soon be replaced by stick-a-brick pap.
The market gets what is demands, I guess.
Well he's right about one thing....
Why are architects “licensed”? Licensed for what?
I lived in PVD for 6 years. I loved the building, but unfortunately no one else did. It was abandoned, empty, and decaying for my entire time there.
"Brutalist lovely".
:)
from a PBN editorial,
"As for what should replace it, developing hotels is one of Procaccianti's strengths, so the project will be well done."
Given that rendering, what a joke.
The brutalist building is 100x shittier than the Marriot building (which is shitty), and most lay people would tell you that. This 75 year old disregard for the person on the street is why the state of architecture is debating these issues as if one was a freshman in school.
The new building will make for a more pleasant experience for the average citizen, which is a criteria that most architects simply can't accept. Maybe that's why Steven Holl was denied his Pritzker. If it's all shitty and fake, at least give something back to society.
In my opinion, the decisions are all economic and have nothing to do the quality of the architecture.
The Fogarty Building could have been turned into a much nicer hotel, but the owners seem to lack imagination.
^ Agreed, real architectural innovation is adaptive resue.
^+++
I like Brutalist... we've got a couple locally by a local architect I always admired (Steinberg).
Here's a tasteful remodel to the original brutalist (arapahoe community college)
before on the west (for a sense of scale):
after (south facade):
^This is an interesting point. I'm less interested in straight "preservation" than imagining how these structures could be brought up to date with tasteful renovations. The same thing happens with classical architecture, brought up to date with modern renovations. It's not as difficult as DS+R would have you believe, anyway, unless you are putting a pod structure on top like that silly Gang Prentice proposal.
Thayer-D, I bagged on you a bit in the recent podcast. Just wasn't feeling your comments, about this project, and contemporary architecture in general. Nothing personal, as I think your thoughts, even as they pretty much run counter to everything I believe, are valuable from a contrarian standpoint. My apologies.
And ThayerD I say, and it's true, that I respect your POV on a lot of things, but I disagree with you on this one.
We talk about comments by several different Archinecters on this weeks podcast.
No worries Ken, I think we simply have different priorities. I remember studying in Florence years ago and really wishing there where a gross concrete parking structure in the middle of all that beauty, just to mix it up. Now of course I would never actually want to see one, but the impulse was there, so I understand the need for novelty or 'pushing the boundaries' as they say. Even traditionalists get bored with the same old thing.
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