Drawing inspiration from surroundings

BLENDING IN: A 2009 addition to Providence's Hampton Inn & Suites has a five-story base that follows the curve of Weybosset Street. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
BLENDING IN: A 2009 addition to Providence's Hampton Inn & Suites has a five-story base that follows the curve of Weybosset Street. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

When architects design new buildings for developed settings, they look to the neighborhood for context.

The new additions may pay homage to what surrounds them, or they may take a completely different approach.

Sometimes, buildings that used to be there serve as inspiration for a design, which is how downtown Providence acquired a slightly crooked hotel building.

In the Financial District, the Hampton Inn & Suites building is made up of two interrelated halves. The left side is the original, 10-story building, which opened in 1928 as a bank and later became a chapel. Its partner, the addition constructed in 2009, sits on a five-story base that follows the angled curve of Weybosset Street.

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The effect is subtle, which was intended, said architect Michael Abbott, a partner in Northeast Collaborative Architects LLC.

In researching the site, he found documentation that the bank had once had a five-story neighbor, which followed the bend in the road. The lower level of the hotel addition “played homage to the five-story building that used to be there,” Abbott said. The street itself, he said, is curved because it was originally an American Indian footpath to the river.

“It’s our only crooked street downtown. I wanted to respect that crookedness by having [the building angled],” Abbott said.

His design approach was to build a sympathetic, quiet addition that would accomplish what the client needed, a doubling of space to accommodate 110 guest rooms, while not losing the historical designation of the building.

So the addition includes an arch at ground level that allows hotel guests to drive in for check-in, rather than the classical columns that designate the bank building. And the façade is brick for the five-story base, reminiscent of the brick in the original building, but stucco for upper floors. The addition also is separated from the original building by a visual cue, a vertical, glass divider between the two structures.

For another project, incorporating a new apartment building to occupy a full block in the College Hill neighborhood represented a unique challenge.

Gilbane Development hired Union Studio Architecture & Community Design to create a new exterior design plan for the 257 Thayer Street project, after the original design by another architect had been rejected by neighborhood advocates as both too generic and too large.

“It was too monumental in scale,” said Donald Powers, founding principal of Union Studio.

His approach, he said, was to break up the single, large mass of building into a series of interrelated components, including two buildings for apartments and a commercial segment facing Thayer Street. The apartment buildings were then separated by an open courtyard, accessing Brook Street with a heavy iron gate.

His design broke up the roofline with a series of steep gables at regular intervals, not intended to mimic the architecture of College Hill, but to provide visual relief and an allusion to the scale of architecture you might find on a college campus.

“It was a whole collage of influences,” he said. “But something that people would look at and say, this feels appropriate.”

On college and private-school campuses architects often consider the neighborhood, as well as the mix of buildings on campus.

The Wheeler School, a private school in Providence, built a new addition this year to house its art and music program, which drew upon several adjoining buildings on Thayer Street, said Steve Gerrard, project designer for Ann Beha Architects, of Boston.

The architects positioned the new building in the same plane, or setback, from the sidewalk, and used brick and other elements that would complement the other structures, which were built in contemporary styles of the 1970s and late 1980s.

“There is a rhythm created by the building directly next to it. It has tall, thin, brick pilasters. By extending some of that rhythm into our building, it creates a continuation. It doesn’t exactly match it, but it plays with it.”

Providence College in 2013 finished construction of its first major academic building in decades. The design of the Ruane Center for the Humanities has won awards for its architects, S/L/A/M Collaborative of Glastonbury, Conn., and Sullivan Buckingham Architects, of Boston.

The architects used a collegiate gothic style in the structure, said John Sweeney, senior vice president for finance and business at Providence College.

The three-story, 63,000-square-foot building includes lecture halls, seminar rooms, classrooms and a great hall that students have adopted as their own, Sweeney said. It connects to the Brutalist-style library, which presented a design challenge that the architects met by choosing exterior materials to mesh with its modern design.

“The students have adopted it as the place where they want to be,” Sweeney said. “We didn’t expect that.” •

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