RWU students assist in Le Moulin redevelopment

BOUNCING BACK: Le Moulin owner Marie Deschenes, seated, shows her niece, Anne Escalante, ideas for the renovation of the complex generated by students at Roger Williams University. / PBN PHOTO/BRIAN MCDONALD
BOUNCING BACK: Le Moulin owner Marie Deschenes, seated, shows her niece, Anne Escalante, ideas for the renovation of the complex generated by students at Roger Williams University. / PBN PHOTO/BRIAN MCDONALD

A group of Roger Williams University graduate architecture students designed a series of plans for an arts-focused historic mill at Market Square in Woonsocket. In the process, they learned first-hand the challenges of adapting historic structures for modern use while providing the mill owner with ideas she plans to use.
Led by Martha Werenfels, principal of the Providence architectural firm of Durkee Brown Viveiros Werenfels Architects in her capacity as an adjunct professor, the 12 students spent the fall semester poring over what is now called Le Moulin, the former Woonsocket Rubber Company complex of mills in the heart of Woonsocket, dating from the 19th century.
“It was very exciting. The kids came up with some awesome ideas,” said Marie Deschenes, owner of Le Moulin. “I was thrilled, they put a lot of time and effort into it.”
The project allowed the students to “realize that, when you’re working with historic buildings, they come with their own set of challenges,” Werenfels said. “This did represent a realistic challenge.”
Much architectural work today in Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts, she noted, involves the reuse of historic mills, even though Rhode Island’s historic tax credits have been eliminated. “We still do a lot of historic-mill projects to take advantage of the federal tax credits,” Werenfels said.
One aspect of the project that flies in the face of reality is the fact that no cost estimates were incorporated into any of the 12 plans that resulted, although the possibility of obtaining federal historic tax credits was a factor some students considered.
Rather than delve into finances at such an early stage, “we try to do the first 1 percent of a project, when nobody is sure it will work,” said Arnold N. Robinson, director of the Community Partnerships Center at the Roger Williams architecture school. He noted funding can be tough to obtain without visuals, so this approach can benefit the building owner by helping to get a project off the ground. “We try to be like a spark plug,” he said, “because we don’t want to compete with the private sector.”
The two buildings on-site – the former Woonsocket Rubber Co. and Falls Yarn Company near the Woonsocket Falls – occupy one of the mill city’s most scenic but hidden natural sights, along a wide, wooded bend of a coursing Blackstone River visible only behind the two structures. “You walk around 180 feet [behind the buildings] and it’s a whole different place,” Robinson said.
The three- and four-story mills, in existence since 1875, have been used in a variety of ways over the years, from making rubber for the Army in World War II to a roller-skating rink between 1910 and 1928, complete with the original, circular-patterned wood floor. The rubber company is best remembered in Woonsocket for manufacturing the dummy rubber tanks used in World War II to trick the enemy into believing the U.S. Army would land in Calais rather than Normandy on D-Day.
Deschenes was working with Bryant University on another aspect of the mill project when Bryant referred her to Roger Williams for design assistance. She declined to provide details on her financing plans, but noted she has a group of talented people with construction skills in place to make it happen.
She said she “absolutely” will incorporate some student ideas in the mixed-use mill development, such as: restoration of a boiler room (she would not reveal for what purpose); removing part of a loading dock and replacing it with an outdoor walkway lined with shops and planters; and adding a staircase as a new access to one of the buildings, with a glass and wood entry. She plans artists’ lofts in one mill on the fourth floor (both mills are in Woonsocket’s tax-free arts district) and plans to adapt one student’s design for zigzagged, rather than straightforward, hallways incorporating a cozy community area in that space. Another student’s stunning design to convert one wall of the rubber mill entirely into glass is “a great idea” but “outside my budget,” Deschenes said, adding with a chuckle “well, it’s outside my budget today.”
The mills already are busy places with 20 tenants that Deschenes described as small, commercial shops, a fencing school, a kick-box school, two art schools, a lounge with a theater and entertainment, a yoga studio, a dance studio, a professional recording studio, a T-shirt printer and an awnings-maker.
The 12 graduate students who worked on Le Moulin are part of Roger Williams’ two-year graduate program in architecture, one of the most highly regarded disciplines at the Bristol educational institution.
Le Moulin was one of six collaborative projects that architecture students worked on last year. Others include: reuse of the Colt Estate Horse Stables in Bristol; establishment of the wind turbine at Portsmouth Abbey in Portsmouth; transit-oriented development studies for Rhode Island and Massachusetts; and development of a historic-preservation plan for Warren. &#8226

No posts to display