The local architecture firm behind some of Providence’s most thoughtful new designs.

Providence has its unlikely treasures, and one of them is the brainy, singularly creative architecture firm known as 3Six0. The small firm’s two founders and principals — Chris Bardt and Kyna Leski — are Harvard-trained RISD professors who happen to be husband and wife.  Besides teaching their respective classes and studios with intensity and polish, they have written and published successful books; look after two excitable Scottish terriers who are as black and graphic as silhouettes; and they often rise at 5 a.m. to squeeze in some rowing on the Seekonk River or Narragansett Bay, where they like to watch sunrise from the ringside seats of their rowing shells.

For nearly 25 years, they’ve also maintained a busy, award-winning professional practice housed in an airy downtown office where they design everything from bowls and benches to houses, churches, public buildings, and commercial interiors.

Leski, 64, and Bardt, 67, still draw with pencils, having come of age in the time of paper architecture. To the surprise of their colleagues, they still hand-cut cardboard to make their own models. It’s how they think. Leski is the gifted geometer — the one who boils everything down to essential shapes. Bardt is masterful with materials and detailing. (One of his books, Material and Mind, was published in 2019). Together they spend their days navigating the gritty realities as well as the ineffable art of making buildings.

Imagine the way a corporate architect might design a major housing block for a contemporary developer — 3Six0’s design process is pretty much the opposite. Formulas are avoided. Materials are deployed not only for practicality but for beauty, meaning, and the health of humans and the planet. Ingenious design and high-level craftsmanship are passionately pursued, no matter the budget.

A quirky mindset is also involved: Leski and Bardt regard mistakes, accidents, dreams, poetry, the buried etymologies of words and certain off-the-cuff activities — for instance, fiddling around with materials late at night at the office during the COVID-19 pandemic, but being out of glue and having to improvise — as meaningful, because such visions and encounters often contain the kernels of interesting solutions. Their buildings, additions, and restorations — most of them in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New York — look and feel elegantly modern. But Bardt and Leski seem uncomfortable with the modernist label. In fact, they profess to be anti-style.

“Modernism is a language, the idea of stripped-down architecture without ornament, everything pure and abstracted,” Bardt said. “It’s a specific palette and we’re completely disinterested in that. Our palette comes from the problem itself. We try to strip a project down to its essential dilemmas and work from those, no matter where it takes us.”

Leski, who grew up in a lyrically sited glass house designed by her architect father, conceded that their work does, in obvious ways, look modern. “We do use modern vocabulary and materials, because we are where and when we are. But it really isn’t about appearances.

“This sounds corny, but I believe in the creative process,” continued Leski, who once wrote a book called The Storm of Creativity and whose father designed the magnificent starburst chandeliers of Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera House after being inspired by a blob of white paint that accidentally spattered his drawing. “It just means that you start something and where it takes you is where it goes. You accept what appears and you work with it.”

Their solutions are often logical and at the same time disarmingly inventive. They once gut-renovated a 4,300-square-foot Jewelry District loft as two conjoined but well-defined living zones with separate kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms — his and hers — in order to solve a couple’s marital woes. (It worked: After decades of marriage and child-rearing, the clients felt like two teenagers dating again.) When a Boston client wanted a single space to serve as a clothing store during the day and a restaurant and lounge at night, they designed 28 glass and steel “clamshells” to house the merchandise. Beautifully constructed to ride on steel rails mounted to the ceiling, these structures opened during the day and closed at night to protect the clothing.

Several years ago, Bardt and Leski created a masterplan for Shepherd of the Valley Chapel, a Methodist church in Hope, Rhode Island, that cloaks its pre-fabricated, vinyl-sided exterior with patterned wood boards, evoking marquetry. Their spectacularly sculptural wooden addition to the church is based on the shape of a spiral. Consecrated in 2008, it contains office space and a children’s chapel. Leski points out that the word spiral comes from the Latin “spirare,” or spirit. “There’s no actual spire on our addition, but the whole thing is one,” she says.

3Six0’s latest building — its most visible yet — is the stunning new Community MusicWorks Center, a $12 million from-the-ground-up headquarters for a local organization that offers music education, mentoring, and a sense of community to underserved youth. Located on a stretch of Providence’s West Side — a jumble of historic residences, parking lots, and auto repair shops — it’s a two-story structure with a bold contemporary presence. Dotted with windows of many sizes, its sawtoothed facade is clad in reddish-brown ipe wood — a hard, rot-resistant timber that will fade to silver with age. Near the entrance, above a triangular public bench where neighborhood residents sometimes hang out, the gigantic red letters “CMW” shout the center’s name and give a foretaste of its engaging, playful interior.

Because the intersection of Dexter and Westminster streets is not quite perpendicular, CMW’s building site is a skewed parallelogram. The architects didn’t fight the awkward shape — in fact, they celebrated it. “It was a given, so it became the DNA of the building,” says Leski. Inside, the cafe, lounge, performance hall, conference room, and many practice rooms are enlivened with odd angles and dynamic asymmetries. There are no hallways. Spaces flow one to another. One all-wood stair opens dramatically onto a balcony overlooking the performance hall.

The overall aesthetic is raw, with exposed pipes and ductwork, a budgetary necessity that the architects were happy to adopt. The tight budget also led to the decision to construct the building’s entire framing as well as its ceilings, walls, columns, and floors out of unfinished CLT, or cross-laminated timber. This blond, carbon-sequestering wood product with its fresh spruce scent had never before been used structurally in Providence. 3Six0 took pains to source it in Austria due to the fact that it’s strong, sustainable, non-toxic, attractive, economical — and it may be the future.

“Every building is some sort of story,” Bardt said. “You walk into a supermarket and you know it, no matter what supermarket it is and even if you’ve never been there. The edges are one thing. The cans are in the middle. You don’t have to think about it— it’s a dulling experience. There’s no joy, it’s business. And often, even with good buildings, everything is prescribed.”

Walking through CMW’s building, on the other hand, really is a series of joyous moments. There’s a staggered staircase that leads nowhere, or perhaps into a child’s heart and brain — the architects designed it so that the kids might sit there informally and gaze through a window into the performance hall. Halfway through construction, they realized it could also be a place for them to play music.

All in all, it’s the difference between being led and exploring. “You have to keep moving around the building to discover the next thing,” Bardt says. “And every time you go around a corner, there’s something else that’s not complete. So you have to go further in order to see more. And every room you walk into: Oh, it’s a little different than you thought it would be.”

On a recent Thursday night at CMW’s first grown-up concert, the double-height performance hall was packed with people. Lofty and airy, the room smelled like freshly planed boards, thanks to walls robed in silky maple panels that are in some places flat and in others, rhythmically folded. Still other parts of the wall look like a house taken down to the studs, or a remarkably beautiful packing crate — all intentional. The unfinished look embodies renowned educator Maxine Greene’s quote about children and their aspirations, “I am what I am not yet” — a lodestar for the design.

Bardt and Leski sat in the front row, both bright-eyed, possibly a little mesmerized, about to have only their second public experience with a project they spent 13 years shepherding through its many phases. Not least of their concerns was the acoustic quality of the space and whether the wood they chose and carefully angled would conduct sound in the best way.

The unfinished look embodies renowned educator Maxine Greene’s quote about children and their aspirations, “I am what I am not yet” — a lodestar for the design.

But they needn’t have worried. Their client, Sebastian Ruth, the founder and artistic director of CMW, stood in the back that night, beaming. “Suddenly, this is my favorite place to hear music,” said Ruth, who has played violin and viola on stages throughout Providence and around the U.S. “It has all the qualities that my colleagues and I value. Acoustically it’s very attractive. It’s visually beautiful. It’s intimate but with a grand feeling. It’s private, like a sanctuary space, but it’s visible to the street. If young people get wiggly, there’s even a place in the cafe where parents can go sit with them and watch the concert on video, with sound piped in.”

Ruth, 49, planted the seeds of CMW in 1997 when, as a Brown University undergrad, he became interested in combining music with social justice. He got a fellowship from the Swearer Center for Public Service and set up a residency, giving music lessons and performing with children from Providence’s public schools, most of whom had never had a music lesson. He grew the idea into a collective of fine musicians deeply embedded in Providence’s lower-income neighborhoods. Now serving roughly 150 kids and families, CMW has won numerous state and national awards, and in 2010, Ruth himself received a MacArthur Fellowship. Until now, though, the organization had a scattered field of operations. Everyone worked out of temporary or inadequate spaces — churches, gyms, community centers and a tiny storefront on Westminster Street. They were perpetually having to move, shift, improvise, beg favors, and drag their instruments around. Now everything is in one place, including their own roomy luthier’s quarters, where students check out well-restored instruments like library books.

“What’s magical is that when we were designing, we of course knew the core spaces we needed, but 3Six0 really understood something bigger about what the building needed to be,” Ruth said. “Spaces like the student lounge and the gallery— we didn’t specify those.  But these informal spaces are about circulation, connection and community and they’ve become some of the most vital.”

Ruth’s favorite part of the building is what he and the architects have come to call “the shard.” The odd geometries of the design created several leftover triangles. The architects made one of them into a dazzling focal point, with a prismatic wedge of a skylight in the roof and under it, on the second story, a triangular span of clear glass floor that seems to bewitch everyone, especially the kids. Directly under that, on the first level, there’s a triangular void outlined with a glass rail that overlooks the basement’s practice area.

“On every floor, when you encounter it, It’s a wow,” Ruth said of the shard. “Suddenly, you’re seeing light and the connection from the sky all the way to the lowest level.” Like CMW itself, he said, “it’s about connecting all the parts.”

From beginning to end, this project was a stretch. That it got made at all or in this thoughtful, inspired way was improbable. In the beginning, CMW lost the site and had to wait a few years until its new owners were willing to sell it to them. Funding was a rocky road. Even the performance hall was considered an unaffordable pipe dream. It had fallen off the table until Ruth came back from doing an artist’s residency in Banff, Canada, where he often walked past a darkened performance hall and felt it powerfully beckoning: it wanted to be filled with music. He decided that a performance hall shouldn’t be a luxury only for the rich but should also be at the center of the building for his young students so they’d aspire and fully expect to perform.  When a few million dollar donations came at the end, including one out of the blue from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, everyone finally breathed easier and all the stuck parts moved ahead.

Bardt gives a measure of design credit to Providence itself.  

“When we were figuring everything out, we went on field trips, including one to an arts organization in Boston — a fairly large, from-the-ground-up structure. It was very organized and strangely disappointing, strangely conservative. What I learned is that what CMW was doing in Providence couldn’t be done in many cities — there’s too much economic and cultural pressure. It may be provincial here, but the freedom that comes from being in a less pressured city is valuable. Things happen in Providence that are truly liberating and crazy. They get through the cracks.”

Bardt and Leski hope there are more houses and commercial buildings in 3Six0’s future. They look forward to more restorations, such as the Old Stone House Inn, a historic property in Little Compton that, several years back, they shored up, restored and also transformed by adding onto it and polishing it into an opulent jewel. They’d be happy to work for developers, too, if the program isn’t too stylistically prescriptive.

Mostly, though, they’d love to design more public buildings in Providence.

“That would be the most meaningful manifestation of everything we’ve been educated in, have thought about and strived for,” Bardt said.

Asked what type of public buildings they’d most want to design, Leski tweaked the question a bit. “We’re good at problematic buildings,” she said “I think problems inspire us.”

By Mimi Read

Mimi Read has written for The New York Times, Architectural Digest, and many other national publications. She moved to Providence two years ago.