And More on Paul Rudolph, Modernism, Brutalism in Providence

One of the most prominent buildings on Providence’s skyline goes to auction April 10 — the Hospital Trust Tower at 1 Financial Plaza. The building is hitting the market as the current owners have foreclosed on the mortgage. A deposit of $250,000 is required to bid on the 28-story tower.

The Hospital Trust Tower, designed by John Carl Warnecke & Associates, was completed in 1973. The skyscraper is kitty-corner to Kennedy Plaza and has been a postmodern counterpoint to the Superman Building’s Art Deco facade for more than 50 years. The second-tallest building in Providence, the Tower is a major player in the city’s urban fabric and a significant landmark.  Similar to the mid-century modern towers of the 1950s, like Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building in New York, the Hospital Trust is an exercise in minimalism and restraint. The materials Warnecke chose to use here — concrete and travertine — were the favored materials of his generation of architects, who were interested in their sculptural qualities and their allusions to classical architecture. Look closely at travertine, which is a type of limestone, and you can see small pores and bubbles in its surface that create a link to nature.

For many members of the public, it comes as a surprise that many Brutalist and postmodern buildings are seen as preservation-worthy, however, many of these structures have passed the conventional starting point for preservation advocacy at more than 50 years old. Groups like Docomomo and the Preserving the Recent Past Network are trying to change that preconception by supporting new research into this underappreciated period of American architecture, building connections among scholars and preservationists who focus on this period, and advocating for them in the face of demolition threats. But there is still lots of work to do. 

Few in Providence today may be aware that the well-known Brutalist architect Paul Rudolph proposed a dramatic, helix-like design for this site that was never built.

Rudolph is in the pantheon of American architects of the 20th century — he chaired Yale University’s Department of Architecture from 1958 through 1964.

His best-known works include Yale’s Art and Architecture Building (1963), the Boston Government Service Center (1963), and the entire campus of UMass Dartmouth (1963-1989). A recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art focused on Rudolph’s lifetime of work, showcasing “the full breadth of Rudolph’s important contributions to architecture — from his early experimental houses in Florida to his civic commissions ren­dered in concrete, and from his utopian visions for urban megastructures and mixed-use sky­scrapers to his extraordinary immersive New York interiors,” according to the exhibition description.

He has come into vogue among Gen Z architecture buffs, including at UMass, where a student-led group called UMass Brut was formed a few years ago to celebrate Rudolph and Brutalism.

David Brussat wrote in a column for the Providence Journal on Dec. 19, 2002 about Rudolph’s unbuilt design: “If Rudolph’s Hospital Trust had been built, I’d have given it a derisive nickname like the Spinal Tap Building, since, with its rounded balconies, it resembles a spine,” he continued. “It might have been preferable to the existing tower — but I’m not sure.”

Although it can be difficult for some today to see the connection quickly, Rudolph was heavily influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright. His Providence proposal draws inspiration from Wright’s Price Tower — built 20 years prior in 1952 — in its articulated facade, incorporating horizontal gestures and shadow play that disrupt the uniformity of the typical office tower.    

One of Rudolph’s designs did come to life elsewhere in Providence, however — Beneficent House, at 1 Chestnut Street downtown. Brussat described the design as “the only decent modernist building in Providence by a famous modern architect.”

Rudolph designed this apartment building for seniors as part of the Weybosset Hill redevelopment project, one initiative in the City’s urban renewal program, which razed whole Providence neighborhoods in the 1950s and ’60s. At the time, Rudolph had lots of work in urban renewal areas in New York City, New Haven, and elsewhere. (Luckily, the concrete behemoth he designed for Robert Moses’s Lower East Side Expressway project never came to fruition, as it would have bulldozed significant portions of the Lower East Side and SoHo).

The Beneficent House building is different from Rudolph’s other designs: It’s brick, a material that Rudolph did not work with often, preferring sandblasted concrete when the budget for it was available and concrete block when it was not. However, Beneficent House has the tell-tale musical quality of Rudolph’s designs as windows jut out into space, creating a cadence along the facade.

J. Hogue, the founder of ArtInRuins, recently did a Brutalist architecture tour with Rhode Island PBS. During the tour, he encouraged viewers to consider Brutalist and other modernist buildings as assets worth preserving in Providence’s urban fabric.

This is a message worth repeating, as Providence has already lost many of its best modern buildings. The 1960s-era Bonanza Bus Terminal downtown was demolished in 1992. When the John E. Fogarty Building was demolished in 2017, a group of preservationists and modern architecture fans — including PPS’s own executive director, Marisa Angell Brown — organized a funeral for the building as the bulldozers moved in. Across the border in Pawtucket, the Apex Building (1969) was partially dismantled in March and is likely to be torn down this year. (The Apex Building was featured in a recent documentary, New England Modernism, which PPS screened in partnership with RISD last year.)

“I think if people don’t start to look at them as they’re becoming 50 years old or older now, the same way that we look at historic structures from the 1880s, 1900s, we could lose quite a few more of them,” Hogue said.